For Once, Then, Something
by jmm0001
Summary: Romanies in America, missing children and a power that threatens everything between Sam and Dean.
1. She's Not There

For Once, Then, Something

Set some weeks after the events of Devil's Trap, call it AU season two. I haven't looked at the spoilers, so don't tell me. Here I'm assuming everyone lived, including the Metallicar, and that John has taken off again. It's not necessary to read 'Unforgivable', but I'm not contradicting myself either.

I am not Romani, I don't know anyone Romani. I've done what research I could, but this is fiction, and the people in this work are fictional. The Romani are real, though, there are Gypsies in the U.S. and if I pique your interest, good. Go and find out for yourself. If I write something particularly offensive to those who know more, please drop me a note.

The title is from the Robert Frost poem; no, you don't have to read it to understand the story. But Robert Frost is just good for your soul, and should be a primer for anyone claiming to be a writer.

Cut and paste the usual disclaimers: yadda yadda yadda.

x x x

_Chapter 1 – She's Not There_

**Dean nearly** hit something when he when he emerged from the shower and saw Sam still crouched over the laptop. They were two hundred miles and barely six hours from the end of their last hunt, a bitch pissy Native American dragon he still couldn't remember the name of. Dean's bruises weren't even fully formed yet, let alone healed, and Sam was the one who had taken the thirty foot tumble through the air to loose rocks this time, propelled by the ugly fucker's swinging tail.

And there he was - hunting up another job. Already.

Dean balled and threw the towel he'd been using on his hair at his brother, hitting the laptop closed in the process. Accidentally. "Saved you some hot water."

"Yeah," Sam said, making no connection between words and the sounds that Dean was making. He opened the laptop again, not even grimacing annoyance.

Sammy - all hunter, all the time. It was wrong. Dean had wanted it; now that he had it, he didn't want it anymore. And yes, he was aware of Irony beating him over the head with a stick. Dean was supposed to protect Sam, and that included keeping him safe from the obsession that consumed their father. At least in Dean's mind. This wasn't saving people. This wasn't continuing where he left off. This was 'I'm going to kill that bastard if it's the last thing I do.' No matter who gets left behind in the process.

With Sam it had always been all or nothing. Four fucking years and not a phone call. Jess's death had sent him reeling, no doubt about it, but fuck with his family and Sam would mess you up. Dean could identify. It was just getting hard to live with.

"Sam." Dean called, pitching it like an order. Like one of Dad's orders. "Shower. Sleep. Research in the morning." That penetrated. Sam looked up at him, blinking to make his eyes focus on something farther away than his computer screen. "You stink like ungila spit anyway."

"Unhcegila," Sam corrected him automatically, pronouncing the glottal stop and all. He blinked and shook his head. '_You're right_' was there in his expression, and he wrinkled his nose. "And I don't think it was spit that fucker was spraying me with. I had the tail, remember."

Dean didn't have to remember. _Been there, done that._

"Look at this though," Sam went on, and turned the laptop towards his brother. Dean closed his eyes and summoned patience, as if by fervent prayer. "Girl missing, twelve years old."

"So?"

"So she's been gone three months, according to classmates and teachers, but the parents are only reporting her missing now."

The prayer wasn't working, and Dean's teeth ground together. He so didn't want to have anything to do with missing, killed or dying kids right now. "Tragic. Not our problem, Sam."

"You should read it. The mother is nearly hysterical."

"I'll read it if you go have a shower." Negotiating with Sam usually worked, had since Sam was able to voice his demands. Sometimes even before that, if Dean could manage to communicate 'carrots first, pudding later' to him - as if fairness went a long way with him, was engraved somewhere in his brain. It did this time, too, and Sam handed the computer to Dean, headed for the bathroom.

Dean looked at the laptop at if it might suddenly come alive and bite him, without reading the article Sam had left onscreen. Sam trusted Dean to read it, judge it, decide if it was worth investigating. If he was determined it was just as likely that Sam would argue and cajole Dean into doing what he wanted anyway, but Sam trusted Dean to at least read the article.

Sam trusted Dean.

Dean, however, knowing him better, had little faith in the man. Dean wanted to snap the computer shut and lie through his teeth that the case was not their kind of job - a typical tragic incident of an unhappy runaway kid, or abusive but utterly normal parents who beat their baby to death and only complained to the police when the story was about to leak anyway. Then he and Sam could take a week, or a month, and do nothing but drive and eat and play pool and listen to music until they were fresh and fit and something ugly made the mistake of getting in their way.

What the fuck was wrong with having a day off?

It hadn't been like this growing up. John had gone weeks, sometimes months, before tracking down every job. Nobody knew about their kind of stuff because it just didn't happen for real very often. Computers were better now, and the Internet was still expanding exponentially, but Dean felt the difference. Bobby had said something similar. There was a storm coming. And he and Sam were right in the middle of it.

But Sam trusted Dean, and in the end Dean would not betray that. Not for the sake of getting to sleep five minutes faster.

Even though he could barely keep his eyes open.

Girl, Kayla Andersen, 12, missing from Duluth, Minnesota. Her parents reported her missing two days ago, but police and FBI investigations so far could find no trace of her for three months back, in September. She showed up for the first week of school, and then nothing. The school contacted the parents, the parents were unconcerned, and it was dropped.

Dean still didn't see anything that would make it their kind of problem. One thing Dean did trust, though, was Sam's instinct for this sort of thing. Magic psychic powers or whatever, he was not often wrong. Dean couldn't remember when Sam actually had been wrong about this sort of thing - finding them jobs - now that he came to think about it.

The mother though, Patricia Andersen, yeah, she was different. Different from your typical abusive murderous parent, uncle or trusted family friend, that is. Dean could pick them out, knew them almost instantly with an instinct he didn't think about too hard, knew when the shitbags were lying through their crocodile tears and pathetic pleas for _help, find my baby, please_, on those miserable exploitive news channels.

Patricia Andersen wasn't one of those. The writer for the _Duluth Herald_ had managed to capture something essential about the woman's grief and distress, and it caught at the back of Dean's throat. Whatever had happened to Kayla, Patricia Andersen was not lying about not even knowing her daughter was missing for three months.

"What do you think?" Sam asked, before he was even out of the bathroom.

Dean turned over in bed, pulling the blanket over himself, and hunkered down. "Did you know there's a foot of snow expected in Duluth tomorrow?" Dean could practically hear Sam's grin from the other bed. He thought he'd won.

x x x

**Gillette, Wyoming** to Duluth, Minnesota was nine hundred miles and two days, following a snowstorm all the way there, because the interstate was an obstacle course of jack-knifed semis and idiots in SUVs who thought four wheel drive meant they could stop faster. "I'm sure he's sick of the sight of us, Dean," Sam said when Dean suggested dropping in on Bobby. But they had to go through South Dakota anyway, and the 'free food, free beds' argument was too essential to ignore.

Bobby appeared to be fully glad to see them both, but surprised. Not a word in ten years and now they were on his doorstep twice in as many months. No demons on their tail this time, Dean assured him, just passing through.

Dean caught Bobby's eye, as Bobby was watching Sam standing by the window, watching the snow falling, fast, oh fast. Bobby's face turned to Dean, full of questions. They sat in the kitchen, a bottle of Jack between them, and Sam's shot glass still untouched on the table.

Dean didn't answer him directly. "Dude," he said instead, to Sam. "She's been gone three months. Tomorrow or the next day, what difference does it make?"

Sam seemed to come back from wherever he'd gone, and looked over his shoulder at him. "You're right." He stepped over the back of the kitchen chair like it was a street curb and sat, loose-limbed, and threw back the shot. Neither Bobby nor Dean mentioned that the grin on his lips would have been a lot more convincing without the clenched shiny focus of his eyes.

Bobby took Dean for twenty dollars at crib, sitting there in the kitchen listening to fifties rock and roll on the AM station, putting Jack to bed. At a penny a point, it took a while. "We should switch to a man's game," Dean groused at one point, when he was fifteen bucks down. "Like poker?"

"Can't play poker with two people, really," Bobby said.

"Sam..?" Dean looked around automatically, but when he turned around Sam was stretched out full length, and then some, on the couch. Dead to the world.

"What was that about, back there?" Bobby asked, dealing out a new hand.

Dean's head was swimming, but he knew immediately what the other man meant, didn't pretend he didn't. Sam, taut and twisted as a bowstring. Just fucking asking to snap. "That's what you get for really truly pissing my brother off."

"What are you going to do?"

"Follow." What else could he do? "Pick up the pieces afterwards."

x x x

**The sky** the next morning was pure blue and the sun glare eyes-watering bright off the melting snow. The plows had the roads clear within a couple hours and they made Duluth just after noon.

The home of Patricia and Gene Andersen was large and well-kept, faux brick, with potted cedars lining the curved driveway around the front, pretty with caps of melting snow. Dean pulled the Impala in behind a three year old Mercedes, parked beside a new Volvo. So, Mr. Andersen did well enough for himself, but probably not enough to attract the attention of ordinary kidnap-for-profit thugs. Not that Dean thought for a moment they would get away with anything that easy.

Sam shook his shoulders out, plastered on his best innocent _'you know you like me'_ face as Dean rang the bell. He gave a little chin-jut head-jerk in Dean's direction, a quick flash of intent eyes as a reminder to his brother. This was work, put your game face on. _Save whatever shit you got going on for later._

Dean was still feeling the effects of the accident, and of the confrontation with the Demon that night, Sam knew. His body had healed, but his spirit still bled. Sam could feel it - see it sometimes, in the hesitation, in the almost tentativeness Dean walked around with nowadays. It made Sam ache with things unrelated to his own injuries. He deliberately blotted out the pictures in his head of Dean swimming in his own blood, pooled there on the floor. The lacerations were fading scars now. The pieces the Demon had ripped out of Dean's soul, _'not like you need them'_, Sam could not touch. Didn't know where to begin.

Sam followed Dean's significant nod, directing his attention across the street. A dark blue sedan, a new model Impala, in fact. Sam thought that was what Dean meant, and he was about to come back with a 'get over yourself' retort - when he noticed the license plate. The first three letters were typically reserved for government issue cars. "Feds?"

Dean shrugged. "Probably."

That was not good news. It wasn't surprising that the FBI was investigating a possible kidnapping, but the Winchesters had a good many reasons not to want to have anything to do with them. Multiple credit card fraud being the least of them.

The girl who answered the door was college-age, blond and blue-eyed, came up to Sam's chin. He faltered, blinked a couple times, and Dean shifted just slightly in front of him, stepping into the gap when Sam couldn't unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth. He introduced Sam as 'Sammy Hagar'. He didn't even catch what Dean called himself. He hoped like hell it was remotely similar to the names he'd given over the phone. "We have an appointment with your mom."

"Uh, I'm sorry, we're not receiving–"

"It's all right," Sam said. "We know about Kayla. Your mom is expecting us."

Blue eyes turned into shiny saucers, looking up at him, and Sam smiled reassuringly, using it deliberately. _Trust us._

"You'd better come in, then," she said, pushing the door wider.

They found Mrs. Andersen in the living room, surrounded by various family, Kayla's aunt and uncle, a couple cousins, a 14 year old brother who looked stunned and shocked. The girl who had answered the door was Kayla's sister, Catherine.

Mrs. Andersen greeted them both with double-handed handshakes, recent tears shiny on her face and a damp Kleenex still clasped in one hand. "Oh, I'm so glad you could come."

"Our pleasure, really." Dean said. Sam hoped he was the only one who could hear the '_who the fuck are all these people_' in his voice. "Uh, is there a place we could talk?"

"You don't want the rest of us to hear?" The question came from a woman standing slightly to the edge of the family, neat business suit, short practical heels, early thirties. Dark thick shoulder length hair, dark eyes; Caucasian, but still standing out like a chocolate swirl in the midst of all these strawberry and cream Scandinavians.

"Agent—?" Sam questioned.

"Leahy." Her eyes widened, but then narrowed almost immediately. She knew that what appeared to be psychic could – did – come from detailed observation and quick analysis. "Special Agent Angela Leahy." Her estimation and suspicion of them had just trebled.

That was a mistake, Sam thought. His mistake. They could have got through this by pretending, appearing ridiculous and dismissible. Now Agent Leahy could easily consider them a threat. Or worse, even as suspects. They did not need the FBI checking them out.

"I'm quite willing to do it here," Sam went on smoothly. "I just thought Mrs. Andersen might like a little privacy."

"What do I have to do?"

"Nothing. Just talk to me." Smile. Reassure. Duck head, not too tall, not too threatening.

"Mrs. Andersen," Agent Leahy warned. "This is exactly the sort of thing I was saying before. They come out of the woodwork to prey upon you when you are at your most vulnerable."

"I'm not interested in your money, Mrs. Andersen. I won't accept it." Sam felt Dean stir beside him. "We just want to help find Kayla."

"Tricia," Mr. Andersen said, cutting through the rest of them. It carried such a weight of authority and warning, warmth and exhaustion, that it made Sam turn to look at him, along with everyone else. _Do you want to do this?_ It was for his wife and his wife alone.

"What could it hurt just to talk to them?" Patricia Andersen said, looking up at Sam.

x x x

**Dean escaped** upstairs, with the excuse that they needed to find an object for Sam to concentrate on, something that would link him to the girl.

"In here," Catherine said, directing him to the right door. When he'd walked right by it without noticing. "You sure you're psychic?" she asked, leaning up against the door with her arms crossed.

"Not me. My brother."

She tilted her head at him. "Your brother? You said his name was Hagar. Sammy Hagar. I remember it was the same as the singer, right?"

"Right." Okay, shit. This was weird. Dean rubbed his hands together, feeling his fingers start to itch. He didn't forget their false ID's, and he didn't spill the truth at the first random question. And calling his brother psychic, although that was the cover they were working, felt like telling the truth. Which felt like being stripped naked. Like this did.

"Sammy Hagar, mas tequila," Dean muttered, agreeing. Focus, dammit. They didn't have room for Dean to be off his game. "My half brother. Different last names."

She nodded, as if that was all right. Perfectly normal. Not as if anyone would have any reason to lie to her.

The little girl's bedroom looked exactly like a little girl's bedroom. Stuffed animals, frills and sequins, too many clothes and not all of them put away neatly. There were traces of fingerprint dust everywhere, no doubt left behind by the police and FBI. One entire wall was covered in some boy's picture that Dean didn't recognize, taken from various magazines. There were cloying fantasy images of fairies and unicorns on the other walls.

"What…" he started, and didn't even know what he was asking. "What was – is – Kayla like?"

Catherine's mouth twitched at the rephrased question, looked down and up again. She didn't actually look all that much like Jessica - just blonde, pretty and blue-eyed. She had none of spunk and spirit Dean had noticed even in the few moments he'd spoken to Sam's girlfriend. Before everything. Catherine looked beaten and haunted, shocked by pain she didn't understand. Nothing this bad had ever happened to her before.

"She's my little sister," she shrugged. Or imitated a shrug. It looked more like a flinch. "Annoying, you know? We didn't have much in common."

Dean walked slowly around the room. There was something. Something _in the room_ was off, not him. Something he should be seeing, but didn't. Couldn't.

He wondered if she noticed the slip into past tense. Catherine's words did not cover the pain and guilt she felt at her little sister's disappearance. 'We weren't that close' was a defense mechanism he'd met before, like you could shut down grief before it even got started. If you didn't love someone, then it didn't hurt so much when they left.

The window was three stories up, with virtually no sill. The brickwork outside gave easy grip to some of the crawlers he knew, but none of them were much good at bypassing the electronic security every window was wired with.

"How could that happen?"

"What?" Dean came back, not having heard what else the girl said.

"Three months, how could that happen? She's quiet, you know. Kyle and me, we're older, we've got school, and soccer, and swimming and… Kayla just wanted her books, you know, her friends at school." Catherine stopped, went on. "You don't forget about your little sister for three months. Mom, she…" Catherine swallowed, shook her head. "She hasn't stopped crying for like five days. I can't even look at her anymore." She sounded guilty, but almost defiant. Not really blaming her mother's evident grief, but finding no solace there, no one to take of her.

_Sucks to be you_, Dean thought. "You might cut her some slack," he offered instead.

"Kayla was everyone's favorite, though. Me 'n Kyle, it's like she was ours, too, you know?"

If she said 'you know' one more time, Dean was going to tie and gag her.

"Mom wanted to have another baby for forever, and then when she couldn't, she got Kayla."

"Kayla was," shook his head, "_is_ adopted?"

Catherine looked at him like he was something found on the bottom of her shoe. She handed Dean a photo from the little girl's desk. It showed all five Andersen family members, four tall, blonde, heavy-boned, fit people with one delicate girl seeming almost half their size; dark chocolate eyes, silky black hair to her waist and coffee with cream skin. "Some psychic, huh?"

That something was niggling at the back of his brain again. Dean stared at the picture, almost willing it to give up its secrets. He'd seen the picture in the news article, a typical school portrait, but here, contrasted directly with her adopted family, she looked almost alien.

Catherine stiffened as the moment stretched too long. "Romani," she said, edged with warning. She'd fought this battle before.

_Click_, went Dean's brain. "Gypsy?"

"Romani," the sister insisted, bristling with a combination of indignant political correctness and big sister protectiveness. "Or Roma. They don't like 'Gypsy'."

But Dean was moving on. Way ahead. Gypsies. Goddamn. He examined the room again. He still couldn't see it. He stripped off the bedclothes, closing his eyes and feeling through the sheets, under the mattress, ignoring Catherine's shouted 'Hey!' Nothing. He ran his hands over the walls, concentrating while trying to clear his thoughts at the same time. The tweeny boy star ended up scattered all over the floor, but that wall was empty of everything except tape and sticky tac.

He shoved the bed aside, just as Gene Andersen appeared in the doorway. "What the hell are you doing to my daughter's –" He stopped, seeing what Dean did, what they all did. An elaborate hex sigil in red wax in the carpet, mixed with what was probably soot, some magically significant ash. Circles inside of pentagrams inside of circles, obscure symbols and a mishmash of Greek, Hebrew and maybe Hindu letters.

There was something in the center Dean couldn't identify. Something brown and cream, and furry.

He kicked his toe through several of the lines, breaking the spell.

"That's Gigi," Catherine whispered. "Her guinea pig. Oh my god-" and she ran, presumably for the nearest toilet.

Said Gigi was three months dead, though, and didn't even smell anymore. He didn't bother examining the animal, nothing to learn there. And _eww_. But now the hex was broken he could see a pair of fetish bags tied on either side of the bed, another one at the foot. _Shit_. It took some kind of real power to make things in clear sight completely invisible. And to make someone disappear from thought and consideration for three months? That took more than the sacrifice of a pet.

"What happened here, in this room?" Dean questioned the father. "Whenever you first realized what had happened to your daughter?"

"I don't know." He looked up from the horror on the carpet, to Dean. A big bluff, competent man, but he was utterly helpless at this. "My wife… we have – had – company coming for Christmas. The cousins were supposed to sleep in here. With Kayla."

"She cleaned," Dean guessed. The mother had disturbed the hex enough, vacuumed up some of the grave dust, whatever, that she had broken the spell. If she'd been thinking about Kayla, the spell would have made her forget and move on - but she'd been moving automatically, busy with tasks, her mind no doubt full of lists of things to do, and it hadn't had a hook to catch her.

It said something that it had taken this long for them to realize Kayla was gone. The more they thought about her, the stronger the spell to forget about her became.

Irony was a sadistic bitch sometimes. And then the screaming started from downstairs.

x x x

'**You could** do the Patricia Arquette thing,' Dean had said. Joking. Pushing. The joke was on him when Sam agreed, and after conning the contact number out of the newspaper reporter, the family had also agreed.

Their cover, such as it was, was the product of one line in one article describing the Andersen family as desperate to follow any and all possible ways to find their daughter. The article had sneered at the family's efforts, obviously implying that they protested too much. Trial by insinuation, conviction by public opinion.

"I'm not wearing some funky hat or looking in a crystal ball," Dean complained later. _Tell me this doesn't freak you out._ Yeah, right. Sam promised him no costumes, no wacky characters or accents. They would go in, ask a few questions, see what they could see and if he had to, Sam would be the one to do the 'reading'. Patricia Arquette, not Zorba the Magnificent. It was far from the worst cover story they'd ever had.

Dean had never once asked if Sam thought he could actually _do_ the Patricia Arquette thing.

"So how does this work?" Patricia Andersen asked.

Sam's quick grin came and went. He had asked for a cup of coffee, more to give Mrs. Andersen something to do than anything, and she had led him into the kitchen. And away from all the relatives.

Fuck if he knew how it worked. He sat at the dining room table, surrounded by the evidence of busy happy family with kids; schedules and calendars tacked to the fridge door, loose notes, a whole row of keys. Someone was a real artist, and the drawings lay everywhere, held pride of place on the computer table.

The kitchen was as generous and as unconsciously affluent as the rest of the house, as the rest of the family. It wasn't even the real dining table, Sam guessed, just the breakfast nook. He remembered Jess informing him of that, a small confused smile on her face that he didn't know such a thing. There was likely a much more formal dining room, one hardly ever used except for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Jess's family had been like this one, large, generous, and even wealthier. They had accepted him as one of them without even an initial period of wariness and evaluation, as if it had never occurred to them not to trust. It occurred to him to wonder how they had dealt with her death, after the initial shock had worn off. He didn't regret not keeping in touch with them, that was too painful to contemplate, but… he wondered.

"Mr. Hagar?"

"Just Sam, please." He accepted the coffee gratefully. The counters were loaded with food, no doubt dropped off by well-meaning but confused friends. "How are you doing?"

Mrs. Andersen swayed, clutched at the countertop at the question. Sam reached out, ready to catch her, when she pulled herself together. "Oh God. How can – I can't think, I can't sleep, I can't do anything. It just goes around and around in my head, you know? How could I have forgotten my daughter? What kind of person does that?"

"I don't think this is your fault, Mrs. Andersen."

She sat kitty-corner to him at the table, turning her own cup around in her hands. She looked at it, but didn't even taste it. "They all think I'm crazy. Talking to a psychic."

Sam grinned and shifted, his discomfort unfeigned.

"What do you think it is?" she asked.

Sam bit at his lip, hearing the what, and not the who. "I don't know. Yet. I'm trying to find out."

"Why? Why are you here?" Her hand fluttered around a bit, not knowing quite what to do with itself. "I mean, you said you didn't want money… I don't understand why you would come all this way…"

"Just helping people is our reward."

Her eyes cleared and saw him. Saw through that lie, perhaps. "Agent Leahy said —"

"What?"

"That you would try to worm out information from me, and then tell it back me as if you could read minds. It's all a trick."

Sam sighed. Lying to this woman wasn't going to work. Despite her own emotional storm, or perhaps because of it, she could see through his bullshit like a radar beacon. "I don't know what you know, or what you believe, Mrs. Andersen, but I can see things. Sometimes. I…" He ran out of words, not knowing what would convince her.

"Kayla used to, I mean…" She shrugged, folded in on herself.

"Tell me."

"She told me to get a tire fixed, once, on the minivan we had before the Volvo. I didn't. Too busy, I guess. That day, it blew. That day. I swear. No one else believes that story."

"Anything else?"

"We learned the hard way not to play cards with her." Sam nodded, encouraging. He didn't know what was going to be significant, but at least she was talking now. "I had no idea what was going on, so I started reading. Looking things up on the internet. You have to understand we don't … have that sort of thing, in our genetic family. We are such meat and potatoes people, but I'm her mother now, and it was there, right in front of us. I don't understand it, but, if you say you can see things," she placed her hand lightly over his, "then I can believe that."

Sam's heart hammered in his chest, for reasons he couldn't easily identify. _I believe you. I believe in you._

Mrs. Andersen went on for some minutes, telling rambling stories about Kayla, revealing details of happy family life, and the challenges of having an adopted child, especially one so distinctly ethnic in a predominantly white-on-white culture. They often thought about moving somewhere more diverse, where a dark-skinned child might have an easier time, but Kayla didn't seem to notice most of the time. She had plenty of friends at school who seemed to take no notice of her differences. She got good at telling people who she was, where she came from - that she wasn't Indian, or Mexican, or Native American, but Romani, what used to be called Gypsy. "That's what she would say. 'What used to be called Gypsy.'"

"You taught her that."

She blinked at him a couple times. "Yeah, I guess I did."

"You did a good job with her."

She laughed and sobbed at the same time, and clutched at her throat. "Young man, if you ever —"

Sam didn't wait for her to finish, as if he could guess but didn't want to hear what she was going to say. Impulse drove him, or call it intuition, but that was too – "Give me your hand."

He didn't know how this worked. Missouri could read people like they were an open book, but even she admitted she couldn't pull things out of the air. That was more or less what Sam was trying to do. He knew his… gift, ability, whatever, was different from Missouri's, as nearly every psychic was different from each other. She read minds and sensed spirits, but she didn't suffer from clairvoyant nightmares or have visions of murdering psychos. Or at least she'd never given them any intimation of it.

But he'd found the house in Salvation. He didn't know how that had worked either. He'd had twenty addresses to check out, and the visions had pulled him to the right one, _this house, this family_, in time that they could save that family. He _could_ see things. Mrs. Andersen believed in him. All he had to do was believe in himself.

He didn't reach out directly for Kayla. He didn't know where she was. He reached out to her mother, sitting so open in front of him. Even ordinary mothers and daughters connected in ways Sam could only imagine. Sam had seen it between Jess and her mother, the way they spoke the same language, not so much finishing each other's sentences as not even needing to even talk, just knowing.

The vision hit him like a sledgehammer, flash-blinding his eyes from the inside out, metal on metal screeching to deafen his brain. He gasped, and controlled his scream of pain into a whimpering whine. He could hear Mrs. Andersen calling his name, could feel her hands on him, shaking, touching, knew she called in panic for help, someone please, help, oh jesus, oh jesus.

He could do nothing about it. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't move, every muscle in his body clenched like a fist, he hunched over himself there in the chair. Seconds stretched into minutes, into years.

Then it let him go, and he collapsed, tumbling off the chair like his strings had been cut, only to fall into his brother's arms. "Dean?"

"Sam! Sammy, dammit."

Oh, that had been a bad one. That note in his brother's voice was reserved for – "You scared the _shit_ out of us. What the fuck did you do?" – death defying moments. And such.

"I didn't do —" he started, but then couldn't finish. He had done it, hadn't he.

He struggled up from his position on the floor, noting the whole congregation was now crowded into the kitchen, watching him. Including Agent Leahy, who held up a cell phone to her ear as she came in to the kitchen.

"Ambulance is on the way." She stumbled to a halt, watching Sam climb to his feet, shake Dean off. "Maybe you shouldn't get up so fast. You weren't breathing for more than a minute."

"I'm fine," Sam said. "Cancel the ambulance. I'm fine." He felt like he'd been hit by a truck. Yes, thinking about it, remembering too recent history, that's pretty much exactly what it felt like. Hopefully the effects of this wouldn't permanently scar, at least.

"What did you see?"

Everyone was watching him, waiting for his magic performance. He didn't want an audience, didn't want them to see how inadequate he was even as he was exposing himself as the freak he'd always feared. But Mrs. Andersen was waiting too. And he had seen something.

"I don't—" he swallowed, dry-mouthed, "I don't know what it means. I only saw fragments." Agent Leahy snorted, and walked away. "Everything was little. Miniature." He'd been smaller, too, but that made sense if he was seeing out of Kayla's eyes. He didn't remember what it was like to be barely four feet tall, though he must have passed through that stage to get where he was.

"What things, objects, did you see?" Dean's voice cut through. "Specifically." Focus, idiot. This is work. Work it. Don't let the image fade.

"A sink. Taps. A chair. A window." His hands tried to imitate their size, but between him and Kayla there was no reference and they just waved in the air.

"Anything outside the window?"

"No." He ran his tongue around the back of his teeth, feeling the tang and bitterness of blood there, and he wondered if he'd bit his tongue or cheek. Now he felt sick. God, he had to get out of here. "Dean," was all he said.

"Okay, we're going."

"Wait, wait," Mrs. Andersen cried, "Where is she? Is she still alive?"

"She alive," Sam said, certain. "She's okay. She's not hurt. She's … confused." It wasn't the best word, but it was the closest he had at this moment.

"Oh thank God. Thank you, Sam, oh God, thank you."

Gene Andersen held his wife back from actually collapsing on top of Sam, just as Dean pulled him back, away, towards the door.

They met Agent Leahy on the way out, her cell again at her ear. "Late sixties, I guess, black, Kansas plates…"

"'67 Impala," _you ignorant bitch_, Dean supplied. "KAZ 2Y5"

The federal agent repeated the information into the phone, then snapped it shut, not taking her eyes off of them, and directly blocking their path out the door.

"That was quite the performance, I'll give you that. Where'd you learn the breath trick?"

"Fuck you," Dean said, all subtlety gone.

"That child is ninety-nine percent certainly dead, and you leading these people on for whatever sick pleasure you get out of it—"

"Does it look like we're having such a good time!" Dean shouted. Sam swayed, trying to get away from the noise. Dean grabbed him by the collar, fisted, as if afraid he was going to fall over. "Get the fuck out of my way."

"I'd like you two to come back to my office. If you have actual information to offer that would help this case, I'm sure you wouldn't mind sharing it. I know I'd love to hear it."

"Fuck you."

She stared at them both coldly. "That's not going to happen."

"Agent Leahy," Gene Andersen said, behind them. "These two are guests in my home. We asked them here. Unless they've committed some crime you can arrest them for I'm asking you to respect that. You as much as accused me of raping and killing my daughter not twelve hours ago. Until the FBI comes up with a better theory than that I'm going to believe that my daughter is still alive. These boys are welcome back anytime. You'll get no complaint against them from me, or any of us." With that he shook Sam's hand, pressing something into it, significantly, _don't show her_. "Thank you, young man. From all of us."

Agent Leahy glanced between them, choosing between risks and rewards, then backed down, stepped away from the door.

"You might want to look at this, instead," Dean said, tossing the FBI woman a cloth bag, tied with string. "If you actually care about solving the case."

x x x

An hour later, and God knew how many miles south of Duluth, Sam stretched and shifted in his seat, cracked the stiffness out of his neck.

"Better?" his brother asked, glancing at him and away.

"Yeah." Even though the pain in his head was down to random spikes, he still wanted to stop pretty soon. The Patricia Arquette thing was fucking exhausting. According to the road signs they were thirty miles out of Minneapolis. Any closer and the motel rates started climbing steeply.

"What was that you gave her?" he asked.

Dean told him about the hex and the fetish bags. The way they seemed to work to make people forget, stop thinking about Kayla, so that she could just disappear.

"Why?"

"Don't know." _Gonna find out._

"Gypsies?"

"Romanies."

"You think someone Romani took her?" Sam rubbed absently at his cheek, feeling the sore spot on the inside with his tongue. "Aside from the cliché, Dean, Gypsies taking children is just… racist."

"I don't think the Gypsies took her. I think they took her _back_."

x

x

x

…tbc...

A/N BigPink **and** elanurel are my betas, and how much does that rock? If you liked this, thank them, too. If you didn't, blame me.

But, you know, let me know…


	2. You Can Sleep While I Drive

Pls see chapter 1 for author's notes and timeline.

summary: Sam and Dean are investigating the disappearance of a Romani girl, Kayla, whose adoptive parents only noticed her missing three months after she actually disappeared. Dean found a Romani hex under the girl's bed, and Sam managed to call up a vision of the girl, still alive.

x x x

Chapter 2 – You Can Sleep While I Drive

_**Sam knelt** on the floor, crouched over his brother. He could feel the wetness soak through the knees of his jeans. "Oh god, you've lost a lot of blood, Dean."_

_Dean looked up at him, shiny-eyed. "You don't love me," he breathed. More blood bubbled from his lips. "Not the way I love you."_

Sam bolted upright, gasping. _Shit_. _Fucking shit. Shitshitshit_. He took a deep breath and forced his eyes to see the dim motel room, not the cabin. Carpet, clothes, bed. No blood. No blood. Not on his hands, not on his clothes. He waited for his heart to stop hammering.

"You all right?"

Dean was awake, alive and awake, and sitting at the tiny table, his face lit with the greenish glow of the computer screen. It was the only light in the room. Sam let himself fall back against the wall. "Fine."

"See anything useful this time?"

Sam shook his head, immediately regretted it. "No." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes as if to push them back into their sockets. He hurt all over. The thrashing the unhcegila had given him and the aftereffects of the vision were now ganging up with his treacherous subconscious, and he hurt _everywhere_, inside and out.

Sam slid back down to the pillow, wanting to curl up so that nothing could get in. But he laid down on his side so that he could see his brother. "It wasn't like that–" He sighed, and combed hair out of his eyes with one hand. Not a vision. Just a guilty conscience. "Just your garden variety nightmare."

Dean ran his fingers across one eyebrow as if he had a headache of his own. Sam wondered if his brother was aware that he was doing it. If they'd been playing poker that would have been a sure tell. Something wasn't right.

"What?"

Dean rolled his shoulders. "Nothing. Go back to sleep."

Sam rolled onto his back with a snort. Aside from the fact that he wasn't five anymore, and that hadn't worked even then, he wasn't sleepy. His watch said it was 10:30pm. His body said it was morning. That's what you got for having a job that involved a lot of night shifts.

"I could go for a run. Or a beer."

Dean looked at him, chin down but head slightly tilted. That was another tell, Sam figured, but damned if he knew what it meant. "There're a couple burgers in the bag. In case you want to eat, you know, today," Dean suggested dryly.

"Run now, eat later. Coming?" It was harder than Sam expected, rolling out of bed. He was still dressed except for shoes and coat, though he couldn't remember shedding even those when he'd collapsed on the bed as soon as they came in the room. God, he was stiff. And sore. A run was just what he needed.

"It's twenty degrees out there, and ice everywhere."

"C'mon. We've done nothing but drive for two days. Don't you want to loosen up?"

"No."

Sam looked up from tying his laces, hearing layered meanings laced with – anger? – in that one word. Dean's face was bland though, and back to concentrating on the computer. Okay, Sam thought, what's wrong with _this_ picture? "I'll clean the guns and pick up some short-skirted waitress later, then? As long as we've got this Freaky Friday thing going on."

"Dude – that is just – not only a chick flick, but a kid's chick flick."

Sam grinned, pulling elbow to shoulder to stretch his back and arms out, "Seriously. Come for a run with me."

"That would put us both down with pneumonia. Besides, I'm working."

"_Dean_. Run. Beer. Research in the morning."

Sam didn't know he'd won until Dean snapped the laptop closed. He kept his victory celebration down to merely bouncing in place as Dean put on shoes and layers of two shirts, fleece, and jacket. Dean persuaded him to exchange the jeans for sweats.

x x x

**They ran** carefully at first. It was dark and it was icy, but they kept to the pavement where salt and traffic made it safer. Most of the snow was gone already. And it wasn't so cold out - thirty degrees, not twenty. Still it was enough that every breath left a cloud trail puffed out behind them, holding there in the night air, still ghosts in the pale streetlight.

It seemed like everyone else in town was huddled deep in their beds as they found the outdoor track field of a nearby high school. At this hour they had the whole city to themselves. Sam hit the chain link fence with a whoop, two strides straight up and flipped over, landing in a collected crouch ready to spring off again. Dean landed beside him.

Like it was a starting gun, one glance between them and they leapt together for the track and ran. Racing each other. The track was dry and clear, the snow remaining on the grassy inside field reflected the streetlights enough to guide dark-adjusted eyes. Neither knowing the finish line except when the other gave up, they didn't hold back or pace each other but ran full tilt, for youth and pride. They were shoulder to shoulder for about thirty seconds, but then Sam pulled ahead, his longer legs giving him a slight advantage. He could hear Dean behind him, as if shifting down a gear for more power, and then Dean put his head down and passed him. Sam's hip started to protest each pounded stride, his lungs burned and his eyes watered in streaks to his ears from the cold.

He pulled up as they came around the turn for one full circuit, when he couldn't tell who was ahead.

Dean pulled his arms over his head and stretched. "Better?"

"Yes, much." Sam dragged in a full lungful of cold air. They started walking back towards the motel. He did feel better. Ruefully he acknowledged to himself that the urge to run was more a product of the nightmare – a primitive fight or flight reflex – rather than a genuine desire to stay in shape. Whatever. The end result was the same. He looked sideways at Dean. "How are you? It's pretty cold–"

"I'm fine, Sam. My lungs are fine."

Not that he would have ever admitted otherwise, Sam knew, but Dean's voice held none of the defensiveness that question had brought out even a week ago.

Tonight's run was the first time in a long time that Sam actually felt fit again. Strong again. God, he'd missed that. He'd had more than his share of injuries over the years. Dean, too, had scars of one sort or another all over. Their almost arrogant assumption of health and capability and nerve, though, they had never considered except as their natural right, until it was gone. It felt so good to feel good again. Like being given a second chance at something, when he thought he'd lost.

"I LOVE Minneapolis!" he yelled to the night air, spreading his arms wide as if he would hug the entire city.

Dean shook his head. "Dude," he said mildly.

Sam swung his arm over his brother's shoulders. "Beer," he said seriously. "We need beer."

"At least that would give you an excuse for being such a dork."

"You're _still_ jealous that I'm taller than you. Man, get over –" He didn't get to finish before Dean pushed him off, and bent down to scoop up some of the crusty snow. Sam laughed and jogged ahead, then turned back and egged his brother on with a 'begin' gesture learned from late night Kung Fu movies. Sam dodged the disintegrating missile easily. God, they hadn't had a snowball fight in _years_.

He remembered why when one ice ball connected with his ear. Dad had put his foot down when they started drawing blood on each other. Long before that all the other kids had refused to play with them, especially against them, when the Winchester Brothers versus everyone else became too much like a real war.

"What?" Dean asked, when Sam just stood there. He craned over to see where Sam was still picking out snow from his clothes and hair. He wasn't bleeding, at least.

"Just thinking about Dad," Sam admitted, and he hated the way Dean seemed to freeze in place at that name. Deer in headlights had more maneuverability. "Just… I wish we could talk to him, you know?"

Dean pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and offered it. They didn't know where their father was, or whether he would answer this time. They hadn't tried. Not since leaving Bobby's.

Sam shook his head. "That's not what I meant." Talking. Actually talking. He and Dad had had a moment – an actual conversation – back before they took on the vampires. Nothing since then.

"I know," Dean said, and put the phone away. Sam reached, as if for his shoulder, then dumped the snow and ice he'd collected from the snowball Dean had nailed him with – right down the front of Dean's shirt. "You—!" By that time Sam was half a block ahead and Dean couldn't catch him all the way back to the motel. Sam's laughter echoed through the still night, and in truth Dean didn't try all that hard.

x x x

**The bar **was dark and nearly deserted. It pretended to Christmas cheer with a couple strands of lights and a naked silver tree, but no one would have been taken in by it. Come Christmas Eve itself it would be just the sort of place to attract the lonely and desperate - who would do nearly anything to escape the reminders all around them of what they didn't have in their lives. Family, friends, present and future happiness.

Right now it suited Dean just fine. Sam's buoyancy lit the room better than klieg lights. He was aware of how many glances and outright stares they gathered as they played pool, the tables being the only well lit corner of the bar. Still, Dean couldn't regret the exposure. He was going to enjoy it as long as it lasted.

Even though Sam's game was so rusty that it was _boring_.

Dean groaned as Sam missed a perfectly simple bank shot. "C'mon, man."

"Your shot," was all he said.

Dean considered the table. It was a challenge, but if he did it properly, he could take down the rest of his balls in two shots. He carefully lined up, letting his breath still and pictured everything in advance – every movement of every ball, calculating the necessary spin to get the cue ball back in position…. Yes, this could work.

The shot was perfect, he could feel it.

So when Sam shouted out a laugh, he didn't understand for a moment. Sam pointed at a pocket. The black nine ball was in it. Dean gaped at it. That wasn't possible. He glared at his brother, standing well away from the table. On the other side. "You _didn't_." _Tell me you didn't just use some freaky mind power to win a _pool game!

"'I didn't' what?" Sam wondered. Dean indicated the table with a glance, an intent look, and 'moving' with a little head jerk. To the outside world it would have been gibberish, but Sam got it after a couple seconds. He just laughed. "No, jerk. You outsmarted yourself with that fancy show-off shot. Double-banked seven ball." Sam traced the errant ball's path with the tip of his cue. "Even you can't track every move of twelve balls at once."

Dean could see he was right. His mistake. He was out of shape, too.

Sam leaned in closer, his expression seeming more serious. "Though, if I could, I wouldn't necessarily admit it." He laughed, his grin as innocent as it was wide. He nodded in the direction of the bar. "Loser buys the beer, wasn't that the deal?"

"Fine," Dean said, putting down his cue. Of course, at the time, that had meant that Sam was buying.

The bartender was female, a good-looking if worn thirty, and she couldn't take her eyes off Sam as she pulled the beer. "You boys new in town?"

"Just passing through," Dean said, watching her watching his brother.

Her faint smile turned into a rueful grin as she put two foaming mugs on the bar, knowing she was caught out as her eyes met his. "I want some of whatever's he's on," she said.

"No, you don't," he said before considering his words. Brief periods of mania overcompensating for years of grief, pain, loss and fear. For psychic powers you didn't understand or control, that made your breathing stop for so long that your brother nearly felt his own heart stop. Nightmares that sent you running into the dark in an effort to escape memories of – "Believe me."

When he got back to the table, someone else was holding his cue. Someone 6'2" and well over two hundred pounds, most of it hanging over his belt. Dean put the beer down on the elbow high counter. "Thanks, dude, I'll take that now."

The man looked at him with cold blue eyes. "I don't think so. You lost. Me 'n your friend here were just talking terms."

Sam shrugged ever so slightly as Dean turned an evaluating '_you were doing what?_' on his brother. "I already have beer," Sam told the other man.

"Cash works," the man said. He pulled out his wallet and slapped down a twenty.

Sam checked his pockets – then froze for a second, a stricken look on his face.

"I thought so," the man said, and reached for Sam's cue.

Sam stepped out of range. "Dean –?" Indicating _'conference'_ with his head.

They both turned their backs on the other man – well, Dean was sort of sideways to him so he could keep an eye out – who watched them with unveiled impatience, his arms crossed and looks towards his own buddies. Whatever Dean was about to say disappeared when Sam held out what he'd found in his pockets. An elastic band held a tightly rolled wad of thousand dollar bills. Five of them.

"Dude, where'd you get that?"

"Gene Andersen gave something to me when he shook my hand. I forgot."

"You forgot five thousand dollars?"

"I didn't know that's what it was."

"Gene Andersen has just gone way up in my appreciation of his coolness."

"We can't keep it."

"We can't what?"

"Dean, we can't keep it. I told them I wouldn't accept their money, and I won't. It's fraud. It's – taking advantage, like Agent Leahy said."

"Are you out of your mind? Of course we can. We didn't ask them to pay us. And how is it fraud? You told them you were a psychic, and goddamn it if you didn't nearly kill yourself with a goddamn vision that their daughter is still alive. We're going to rescue her now, aren't we? How is that in any way fraud?"

"Don't shout at me, Dean. I mean it. We're not keeping the money."

"Are you guys playing pool or with yourselves?" Fat Guy complained behind them.

"Fuck," Dean started.

"You." Sam finished.

Dean shook his head, _only you_, then took one of the bills out. "Put that down and he'll shut up pretty fast."

"What if he doesn't? What if he wins?"

"Easy come, easy go."

Sam looked leery, but took the bill from Dean and put it down on the table.

Fat Guy stared at it, and at them. "You've gotta be shitting me." Anger, fear, anger, then embarrassment flashed across his face.

Dean took a seat against the wall, stretched his arms out along the counter. This could be interesting. If it had been him playing, he would have been so narrowly focused on the game he practically didn't see the other player, let alone the rest of the bar. As it was, Sam stood at the end of the table, cue in hand, and Dean could do nothing. He watched as Fat Guy sent the bill to be checked by the bartender. It was authentic. Then he plied his friends for all their cash.

Meanwhile Sam stood still, his eyes on the pool table, cue butt on the floor, both hands holding it loosely near the tip. Dean recognized the pose. Sam was concentrating. Sam was going deep, the same place Dean went before a big game or a big hunt; that zen state that blocked out distractions and slowed the world to near-perfect clarity.

Dean mourned, to see that look on his brother. Now, more than ever, Sam looked like a true son of John Winchester. _This is what you get for really truly pissing my brother off._ He'd always known that Sam had it in him. That focus, that possibility of obsession. A potential unrealized. And from somewhere deep inside, Dean acknowledged his hand in keeping that potential buried. Turned away from the hunt.

No longer.

Until now Sam's focus had been turned on himself; his future, his happiness, his choices in life. Turned that way by Dean himself, Dean realized with sudden clarity, because Sam was Dean's focus. He'd passed that on the same way he'd passed on his big brother knowledge of nearly everything. It had taken him away to Stanford, but it had also let Sam grow up with the illusions and dreams of normal life.

No longer.

Sam was moving beyond him. Dean could sense it, especially in the way it was almost always Sam who chose where they went and what jobs they took. In the new directions his visions were leading him, directions in which Dean had no expertise to offer even as he could do nothing for the obvious pain Sam suffered from the same visions. Dean saw his brother call _the quiet_ to him, at will and knew, there and then, Sam didn't need him anymore.

Sitting there in a dirty Minneapolis bar, Dean suddenly knew that the danger of Sam leaving the hunt for a normal safe life was long past. The danger now was of Sam leaving him _behind_.

Fat Guy came back. "$762.00"

Dean's lips split to bare his teeth in an expression that had little resemblance to a smile. "Not good enough."

"Done," Sam said, at the same time.

Sam didn't look at him. Fat Guy did, and Dean shrugged and leaned back against the wall again.

The game was a bit anti-climatic. Fat Guy won the toss for break, but didn't sink anything. Neither of them were expert players and the shots were pretty safe and standard. But Sam, with all that energy that had burned so brightly earlier bottled and focused within, was pretty clearly the superior player. He sank the nine ball while Fat Guy still had three balls on the table.

Sam laid his cue on the table as he picked up the cash and folded it into a pocket. "Thanks, good game."

Fat Guy's face turned red and puffed.

Dean knew that a white face was more dangerous, a sign of immediate attack, but this guy might at any time remember how to count and that he had five friends with him and Sam had only Dean. But then again, as the guy's gaze shifted between Sam and the way Dean uncoiled from his stool to stand behind his brother, maybe he could figure things better than mere arithmetic.

"Good game," Fat Guy muttered, and the briefest of hand touches imitated a handshake.

Dean virtually dragged Sam out after that. When Sam left a hundred dollar bill at the bar for '_the other team, on me_' Dean actually had to stop himself from grabbing Sam by the collar and turning the virtually into literally.

x x x

**It was** some unreasonably early hour when Dean turned over to find Sam awake, head down in the computer.

"What. Are. You. Doing?"

"Solitaire. Couldn't sleep."

Dean groaned, turned over again and punched his pillow. A poor substitute.

"I couldn't stop thinking about that game. Seven hundred and sixty dollars, Dean."

"Six hundred and sixty-two dollars, counting the hundred you left at the bar, you idiot." Dean sighed, and turned onto his back. "Congratulations, grasshopper. You have surpassed the teacher."

"Dean –"

"I'm serious. I've never taken anyone for that much. Not at a single game."

"I was lucky."

"I'm glad you realize that," Dean said, turning his head to look at him. "If you're going to do the hustling around here, then you're going to have to work on your game a lot more."

"I didn't hustle him," Sam said. "I was just playing a straight game."

"When you take anyone for seven hundred and sixty-two dollars it's called a hustle, Sam. Don't fucking pretend you don't know that."

Sam didn't say anything for quite a while. Then, "Why are you mad at me?"

"I'm not mad, Sam, I'm tired. Go to sleep."

x x x

**Research in** the morning. They sorted through the too-long nationwide list of missing children to come up with likely candidates. None of them were listed as Romani, though some were called unknown or mixed race. They argued over a couple kids, whether they were really East Indian or whether they were misidentified. There likely wasn't a checkbox for Romani on the 'race' list. When they checked the parents out, that's when they hit paydirt. There were six children that were missing, possibly Romani _and_ either adopted or fostered.

Sam plotted them on a map. No real pattern that he could see. They stretched from Southern California to South Dakota and over to Massachusetts.

He looked over Dean's shoulder as he worked. Dean was searching the classified ads in the papers in each of the cities and towns that were missing a Romani child. Key words: palm reading psychic. Not surprisingly, a huge number of pages turned up.

Sam pulled up a chair and watched his brother work. He didn't know where he was going with this, but it was more than he had, vision or no.

Eventually Dean narrowed down the list to one Madame Zora, who had an ad in the paper of every town where a child had disappeared. Palm reader and clairvoyant. '_Your chance to speak to a real Gypsy fortune teller, appearing for one week only.'_

Dean turned the laptop to Sam, to let him read more easily. Sam examined his brother instead. Dean had known what he was looking for before he'd started. "Search for Madame Zora's other 'appearances'," Sam suggested.

Dean nodded, _good idea_, and took the laptop back. There were a half dozen more, unconnected with any report of a missing child. Sam plotted those on the map as well. That made a loose line more or less diagonally across the country, from deep near the Mexico/California border to Minnesota.

"Dean, what is she doing with these kids?" Sam finally had to ask.

They talked it through, back and forth, throwing ideas around. Why were there no bodies? If Kayla really was alive after three months, why was she keeping them? And where? Were the others still alive as well? Just in practical terms, keeping several children at once was hugely complicated. It seemed too much to hope for. They both knew that children were had especially strong psychic and life energies. Was this woman using them as fuel for her fortune-telling business, draining and feeding off them like vampires did off of human blood?

That didn't make any sense, Sam decided. The spell to hide the children's disappearance took a lot more power than any palm reading or fortune telling. But if she was using them to escape the consequences of the visions… maybe then. If she could take the headaches that split Sam's head in two and funnel them into the children….

"If she even gets the damned headaches," Dean muttered, more or less under his breath.

Sam didn't respond to that last. "Or she could run a darker line of witchcraft by request under the guise of an innocent palm reading business," he said.

"Dirty deeds done dirt cheap," Dean suggested, but he looked less than amused by the idea.

"What?" Sam asked, sensing some sort of conflict from him. About the headaches? He hadn't planned on the vision and he certainly hadn't planned on the passing out and not breathing. Sam didn't want to bring it up, but if they didn't talk about it in caustic asides, it meant they didn't talk about it at all.

Dean looked about to speak, then shook his head. "Doesn't matter."

"She's in Yuma, now. We could ask her." Sam pointed out the latest advertisement and that it didn't have an expiry date.

"Arizona?"

"Last time I checked, Dean."

"Of course she is."

Sam just grinned, remembering Dean's irrational loathing of the state. "Think of it this way. At least it won't be snowing."

x x x

**Minneapolis to** Kansas City, to check the mail box to see if their new credit cards had come in. Sam accepted one for Josh Hardwell when Dean handed it to him. Ransom money from confused grieving fathers was one thing, defrauding multinational credit companies another. If he was hunting, this was part of the game. So be it.

I-35 south to Oklahoma City, then I-40 – old Route 66 – straight west. Overnight outside of Amarillo, just long enough to stretch long bodies out on a bed for a few hours of real sleep, and then up and west again to just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. 17 south to I-8 and west again to Yuma. Two solid days of driving, including switching places, sleeping while the other drove.

Driving off the high plateau down towards Phoenix was one of Sam's favorite stretches of road in the entire country, where the landscape changed in a matter of about fifteen minutes from pine woods and winter, into saguaro desert and sunshine. They lost about four thousand feet of altitude and gained about forty degrees of temperature. He pulled the hoodie over his head, and rolled down the window.

Dean stirred and woke, grabbing at the wheel as Sam had both hands busy. And his eyes covered. "Dude!" It only took him a couple moments to place the road and the scenery. Sam recognized the look on his face. _Fucking Arizona._

Sam laughed at him, searching high and low for his sunglasses, letting Dean steer from the passenger seat.

"Stop messing around."

"Dude, what have you got against an entire state?"

"There are more dead things per square mile here than nearly anywhere else. This place – it tolerates people for about a thousand years and then, shit, poof, there goes another whole civilization. The Anasazi, the Aztecs, the Spanish, the Apache. It's our turn next."

"The Apache are still here. The Aztecs were in Mexico." Sunglasses found, way back under the seat. He slid them on, and took the wheel back. "And, besides, '_poof'!_"

"I'm just saying. They deliberately name places here like Superstition. And Tombstone."

"Paradise Valley." Sam laughed again.

"Boneyard."

"Carefree."

"Surprise."

"What's wrong with Surprise?" Sam asked. Dean just looked at him, _you're kidding, right?_ Sam gave him that one. "Sweetwater."

"Del Muerto."

Sam grinned. "Two Guns."

"Weedville."

"Gripe."

"Laugh it up. There's power here, and people should know better than to make fun of it."

"What if they're not making fun," Sam wondered aloud. "Maybe they're just… accepting it into their lives. Instead of denying it." Dean shot him a look, then folded himself back into a semi-comfortable position against the door.

x x x

**Yuma was** a small city on the edge of both California and Mexico, booming and prosperous. Fed each year by the flush of winter migrants from the north, and a growing agriculture industry that fed the entire country, and beyond, with vegetables all winter. Madame Zora had a small storefront on one of the Old Town main streets. In the second floor window of the nineteenth century building they spotted the pale red neon sign in the shape of a hand, and a homemade sign in English and Spanish: Palms Read, Fortune Told.

Dean parked the Impala in an empty lot across the street. He opened the hood as if they had engine troubles, then opened the trunk. Sam just watched him, standing behind the car as unobtrusively as possible as Dean dug around in the trunk for something. The plan was that Sam would go in and keep Zora busy while Dean scouted around to see if he could see any trace of Kayla or the other children in the building. What Dean needed out of the back, Sam didn't know, but he was getting the impression that Dean's plan differed slightly from Sam's plan.

Dean handed him a small weight of raw silver, about the size of his little finger – the remainder of their stash from the last bullet casting. Sam's eyebrows drew down. "Money works, you know."

"Just trust me on this," he said. He also pointed out a sigil in their father's journal, one that Sam had never been able to identify or associate properly. "Draw that on her right palm with the silver."

_Why? You know this how? What aren't you telling me?_ _If you know so fucking much why am I the one going to get my palm read?_ The questions were there on his lips, but something in Dean's manner said that he wouldn't answer any of them. Dean wouldn't even look him directly in the eye. Trust him. Sam could do that. He didn't like it. He didn't like the feeling that Dean wasn't treating him as full partner in this. Worse, that Dean seemed determined to protect some secret knowledge.

"You won't need that," Dean said when Sam loaded the Glock with alternating sanctified and silver rounds, and stowed it in the small of his back.

Sam stared. _What the hell have you done with my brother?_ "Dean, there's probably a very powerful witch in there, maybe even Kayla and who knows how many other kidnapped children. Of course I'm going to take a weapon." He checked that he could reach it easily with either hand under his coat. Right hand was faster, of course, but not always an option. "Are you going to be able to cover me?"

Dean's eyes flicked up at him, anger and fear – fear? – flaring out, and as quickly extinguished. Dean looked back down at the Impala's trunk which was suddenly very interesting. "What kind of question is that?"

"I'm asking, Dean. I need to know." What the fuck was _Dean_ afraid of? No, he'd read that wrong, Sam thought. Must have.

"You don't need to ask that. Ever."

"Fine."

Sam turned on his heel and stalked across the wide street, all but completely deserted of traffic. He didn't look back to see what Dean did, but he heard the Impala's trunk close, closely followed by the slam of one of its doors. Then he was inside the building and taking the stairs up to Madame Zora's place three at a time.

Dean would do whatever Dean was planning on doing. Sam didn't want to hazard a guess. He promised he would be there to cover Sam, he would be there.

The stairway was extremely narrow, and Sam's shoulders only cleared the sides by a couple inches. Extremely good for a defensive position, extremely bad for an attacking one. Only one person was getting up or down these stairs at any one time.

It was also stifling, dusty and smelled of old incense and spices.

Madame Zora announced her office with another stylized hand scrawled on the wooden door. Sam didn't know whether to knock or not, but the door was unlocked, so he just went in.

The outer room was pretty much as he expected, large curtains in complicated prints draped across the walls, and there was a curtain across a doorframe he couldn't see through. It was large enough to hold several people, like a doctor's waiting room, but there was no one else there. Instead of a couch or chairs there were huge pillows on the floor. No magazines, but large and small candles everywhere, and a small water fountain. There was much more behind the door frame, Sam guessed, given the size of the building. Many more rooms, hiding what?

He heard the barely audible hiss and flutter of someone moving beyond the curtain. Sitting down.

"Come in," said a highly accented female voice.

Sam pushed back the curtain. The next room appeared tiny; with draped fabric walls as if he was entering into a tent. Even darker than the windowless outer room, this one was lit only by candlelight. It was a surprisingly effective piece of theater. There was no telling how large the actual room was, or how many people were behind the drapes to assist in the illusions.

The woman seated at the table was a bit of a surprise. The black hair, the scarf holding it back, the ropes of gold charms and earrings were all entirely expected – the classic cliché Gypsy image -- but the woman, _girl really,_ was maybe all of sixteen years old. "I, uh, I'm looking for _Madame_ Zora."

"I am Zora," she said.

"Maybe your mother could speak to me?"

Black eyes flashed. "I am Zora."

"How old are you?"

"How old are _you_?" she came back, in nearly perfect teenage American.

Sam smiled and slid down in the chair opposite her. "Seriously. How old are you?"

"Twenty," she huffed, her fingers running nervously back and forth on the deck of Tarot cards in front of her. "How old are you?"

In about four years, Sam thought. "Older than you."

"Did you actually want something beside to make fun of me?"

Not quite perfect American English, Sam realized. Some kind of European accent there still. And the cards were impressive. The backs were hand-painted, from what he could see, probably quite old.

"I want to know my future," Sam said, pulling out his full self-deprecating smile. He held out his hand to her.

She glanced down at it and back up at his face. "Liar."

"What?" _What did she see in his palm? Could she sense deception? _ Sam stumbled a bit, smiled wider. The smile worked on everyone.

"Stop wasting my time."

"Are you really a Gypsy?" Her head came up at that, and her body tensed. Offense? Fear? Sam couldn't tell.

"Most people ask if I really can see the future."

"I'm not most people." God, now he was doing Dean's lines. Stall. Give Dean a chance to do his reconnoiter.

She looked at him, all teenage disdain. _You're stupider than most people,_ he could almost hear her thinking. "Ten dollars for a palm reading, twenty for a full fortune."

"Does the fortune include a card reading?"

"Yes."

"Astrology?"

Again the flash. _Don't you know anything?_ "I don't do astrology. Gypsies don't do astrology."

"So you are a Gypsy."

"I am Romani, yes. Enough." She was bored and short-tempered. She put her right hand on the table, palm up. "Cross my palm with silver and I'll tell you your future."

For some reason Sam hesitated. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up, hearing menace and perhaps a trace of power in her voice. _Dean, goddamn it. You better be fucking ready for this. _ Whatever _this_ was going to be.

He took the piece of silver and traced the sigil on her palm. She didn't start to burn, or disintegrate or even hiss in pain. She didn't even move her hand. But when he laid the piece of silver in her palm she looked up at him with wide astonished eyes, and her fingers closed around the silver.

"Oh." She blinked, looking, reevaluating him. Her chair raked back along the floor as she stood, and Sam stood too, his hand going behind his back, his fingers finding the gun's grip. "Oh. Um, wait here. Maybe you should talk to – Wait here."

Sam thought of following her as she disappeared behind a curtain. He thought of going out the other way, to check the hall to see if anyone was trying to run for it. But he heard the girl's voice, not far away, and a rapid exchange in a language he couldn't identify.

He straightened as Zora and another, much older, woman returned to his side of the curtains. The older woman was tiny, barely coming up to Sam's chest. She too wore a scarf over her long white hair, which was braided and rolled into a bun, but it was a practical everyday kind of item, many times washed and starting to fade. Her skirts were once orange but faded now to a pale ochre, well worn, heavily layered and down past her ankles. Her face looked the hardest used of all, a mass of deep grooves that put the word wrinkles to shame. He didn't know why the old woman didn't do the palm readings. This was a face the tourists would eat up, full of exotic ancient wisdom. Far more than any sixteen year old girl.

Zora held out the silver in her palm, glancing at Sam as if explaining.

Sam heard a door open and close in the outer room behind him. Dean, he hoped. When he didn't hear anything else, though, he wondered. Either he'd found sign of the kids or he hadn't. In either case, Sam getting his fortune told was the cover and not the point of this whole exercise. Wasn't it? _Goddamn it, Dean._

The old woman barked something at Sam. A question by her tone, though Sam had no idea what. She threw up one hand in dismissal when Sam didn't answer. "_Gadze,"_ she said. Zora prevented her from walking away, with more quick words. The old woman assented to something.

"She wants to know how you know this."

Didn't sound that way to Sam. It sounded like she wanted to have nothing to do with him.

Sam bowed slightly in her direction. It partly instinct, partly training. Almost all cultures, with the notable exception of Western and North American, respected and valued the elderly. Sam took his clue from the deference Zora showed her. "I will tell her, if she reads my fortune."

"You are not Romani."

"No."

The old woman may or may not have understood him. She said a few words to Zora, who then gestured to Sam to sit.

"What do you wish to know?" Zora translated, when the old woman took her seat, using the chair Zora used to have. Zora stood.

"I'm looking for someone. Will I find her?"

Zora translated it back, and the old woman closed her eyes and started to rock back and forth. Her hand flopped out suddenly and hard on the table, fingers wide and grasping. Zora nodded 'do it' when Sam looked at her for direction. Sam put his hand in the old woman's, who clamped down on it so hard as to draw outlines of her nails in his skin.

Sam gasped at the unexpected strength there, and the pain grinding the bones together.

The old woman started to speak. Sam couldn't make heads or tails of it. Zora barely could either, apparently. "You … you will find what you seek. What you seek is… not what you seek," and she shrugged apologetically. "What you seek is… wrong. Is dirty. Impure –" Zora's translation broke off as the woman's voice grew louder and more vehement. She suddenly opened her eyes and spat, literally spat, across the table at Sam, nearly throwing his hand back at him. More venom poured from her, and she backed away. Zora was yelling now, too, at her.

"What?" Sam demanded. "What did she say?"

The old woman gestured as if commanding. _Tell him._

Zora looked distraught. "She says – she says you are touched."

_Touched!_

"Sammy? What the hell?" Dean called from the outer room.

"In here!" _Now you show up?_

"What the hell is all the yelling—?" Dean's face was the perfect plaster mask of innocence, but his eyes gave him away. To Sam, at least, who knew that look. It was the look of Dean being exceptionally pleased with himself, in the middle of some con or hustle. When people lined up and bounced off each other at his direction just like the perfect pool shot, like he'd calculated all the actions and reactions and it was all unfolding exactly as he wanted.

The old woman started screeching again, this time at Dean's entrance.

"Touched by what?" Sam asked Zora.

Dean leaned over the table towards the old woman. "Shut up," he hissed at her. Her mouth clamped shut out of sheer effrontery.

"Touched by the blood. Without soul." Zora questioned the old woman, who started again with her invective, until Dean merely leaned towards her again. The old woman made a sign in the air, and Dean another gesture back. Something really offensive, because the woman huffed, said something to Zora and disappeared behind a curtain.

"I'm sorry," Zora said, but Dean interrupted her.

"_Marime_, is that what she said?" His theatrical outrage was still on full throttle.

_Shut the fuck up, Dean,_ Sam begged silently. He stood frozen in place, unable to move. Like the nine ball hit by the uncounted seven ball, Sam knew something was horribly wrong. This wasn't under Dean's control at all. He hadn't figured _all_ the angles.

"Touched by the blood without soul." Zora shook her head. "I'm sorry. I don't know what it means."

"Dirty? Unclean?" Dean's voice was all offended indignation. "You called my brother that? Dirty? You call me that! How dare you!"

Dean went on with his rant for nearly a minute, full of more '_how dare you'_ s and various unflattering references to how women shouldn't dare talk to men that way and even, Sam was fairly sure but it was almost too unbelievable, a disparaging reference to Zora's menstrual cycle. Zora turned bright red and her mouth clamped shut. "Call the _Rom baro_," Dean demanded. "I want to talk to him."

Zora, her eyes nearly spilling tears, spun and disappeared behind the curtain. Dean marched Sam to the outer room with one hand at his elbow, looking entirely too pleased with himself for reducing a sixteen-year-old girl to tears.

Sam wrenched himself out of Dean's hand. "What the fuck, Dean?"

"Yeah, what was that about?" Dean came back. He bounced. He almost literally bounced. Sam recognized this mood on his brother, all jazzed up and the adrenaline all but sizzling in his veins from the hunt. Only this time Dean had taken that killer instinct out on someone who had no means to defend herself. Using only words as weapons, he still managed to draw blood.

Sam didn't know what to ask first. _What is a Rom baro, and how the hell do you know about it? When did you turn into Mr. Gypsy Expert? What the fuck is that sigil doing in Dad's journal and no one ever thought to explain it to me? Did you know what it meant or were you just guessing? And why didn't you say something, _anything,_ about it in the _two days_ it took to drive here?_ Did you know!

"What did she mean about the '_blood without soul'_?" Dean was intently ignoring Sam's fuming. He all but rubbed his hands together.

"Jess," Sam said, an accusation, because if Dean _had_ figured this angle, he was going to beat his brother bloody for not at least warning him.

Dean stopped bouncing.

"When I saw her on the ceiling. When – her blood – it was cold. _Wrong_."

Zora came into the outer room. She wouldn't meet their eyes. "The _Rom baro_ will see you."

x

x

x  
…tbc…

Much love and gratitude to my betas, BigPink and elanurel, as always. -jmm


	3. People Are Strange

For Once, Then, Something

AU Season 2. No spoilers, just my own speculations.

Summary: Sam and Dean track a missing girl across the country from Duluth to Yuma, Arizona, following the trail of a Romani fortune teller who just happens to be in every town when other Romani kids go missing. And Dean knows stuff he's not telling Sam.

x x x

_Chapter 3: People Are Strange_

"What do you mean her blood was wrong?" Dean demanded.

They were following Zora in the Impala, she in her rusted-out Tercel ahead of them. Going to see the _Rom baro_. Whatever the hell that was. _You couldn't, like, give me a fucking _clue_ what's going on here, Dean?_ Sam's rage simmered very near boiling over. The only thing holding it back, _the only thing_, was the implication that whatever was going on here had something to do with Jess, and the Demon, and the fear – the goddamn terror – of confronting that thing again.

"Sam, come on. I'm sorry. Please. Talk to me. We don't have a lot of time here. What did you mean?"

Sam closed his eyes. Jess, on the ceiling. Fire. Fire blooming out around her. Her mouth and eyes wide to him. Sam winced, and forced himself away from the images. Before that. Laying down on the bed. No clue. No fucking premonition, no weird feelings, just – if he was so psychic, how could he possibly not have known?

"Sam!" Dean's voice was layered with pain, and apology, and demand.

"There was nothing right about it," Sam said. "I felt the drops of her blood." They were cold, almost icy. "She was over my head. It _cut_ her, Dean, before the fire. I felt the drops, and… there was nothing." God, he wasn't saying this right. Dean's brow narrowed, but he kept his attention on the road, and on the car in front of them.

Sam scrubbed at his face, trying to force his concentration, but the feelings were all coming back at once. Looking up, seeing her there. "I saw her. But – it was like she wasn't there. You know how you can sense people?" _Please tell me you can do that_. "You look at them and know they're there. When they look at you, there's something there?" _Dean! Give me something here_.

"Yeah, I know what you mean."

"She wasn't there," Sam said. "I looked, I saw her there, and it was like I was looking at a movie or something. She already wasn't there."

"You were in shock."

Sam shook his head. "I thought so, too, at first. But after Lawrence, after seeing Mom there – I don't think so."

"Why –" Dean swallowed, and forced out his question. Maybe a different question than what he started with. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"'_I think the Demon took my girlfriend's spirit who knows where before it burned her body?_' What the fuck would be the point, Dean?" Besides wallowing. "And when exactly were we supposed to have this hypothetical conversation?"

"Maybe she escaped. Like Mom."

"Maybe," Sam sighed, more for Dean's benefit than because he believed it was possible. He still didn't want to have this conversation. Maybe Dean thought he was comforting Sam somehow, like it was really likely that Jess's spirit wasn't in hell right now. As if thinking of her as some disembodied thing they would have to put to rest some day was really all that better. And Dean was almost deliberately ignoring the more important aspects. Sam had been touched – anointed – by Jess's blood _after_ her spirit had fled. After the Demon had done whatever he had done to her.

They both knew blood had supernatural significance. It was life, death, breath, power, identity… everything.

Sam had known, right from the start of all this. He was marked. He was touched.

Dean denied. He said it was a family business, he pretended that they were in this for good and for right and for saving people. Dean had that luxury, but Sam knew, and Dean's denials were wearing thin. It wasn't ego or self-absorption that made Sam so certain that all the troubles his family had gone through were because of him. It was just – pattern recognition. His mother. His nursery. His girlfriend. His 'abilities'.

He would rather have been drowned at birth than bring this down on his family. Now, it was too late.

Now, whatever plans that creature had for him, _and all the other children like him_, he would fight with every fiber of his being. He would fight, and he would win. Or he would die trying, but that thing would never, _never _win.

Then it was too late to say any of this to Dean, even if he had been inclined, because they were pulling into a motel-campground complex that looked exactly like every other rundown, disreputable, flea-infested hole-in-the-wall they chose in any other town across the country.

"Lucy, I'm home…" Dean gave him a sharp look, and Sam desisted.

This one had a equally unlovable campground behind the motel, and this is where Zora led them. The campground was nearly full of trailers and motor homes, none of them new and a few of them looking like they weren't going anywhere ever again. A couple of them had roofs built over top, and fences around them.

Only this was a Romani camp. Several men were gathered around outdoor picnic tables, smoking and drinking, watching them drive by. For the most part they wore ordinary clothes. Jeans, shirts of various colors. A few of them wore caps or hats, but most were bare-headed. The women all wore long skirts, each a different color, and unlike the men, they all appeared busy.

Zora stopped in front of one of the larger trailers. It had a fairly new Ford F-250 parked in front of it as well. Sam looked around as he and Dean got out of the Impala. Everyone was watching them, women and men, as Zora knocked on the door of the trailer.

A woman answered the door, looked them over and let them in. Apparently they were expected.

She gave them sharp looks as they stepped up the narrow couple of step into the trailer, but her head was slightly tilted down, and her gaze slid away from his as Sam looked at her. He didn't miss the hard line of disapproval in her mouth though. She indicated they should proceed her. Dean nodded politely, so Sam did as well.

Inside the trailer it looked neatly kept, but lived in. The walls were covered in photos of presumed family and friends, and there were knick-knacks and souvenirs of travel across the country. A tall square-jawed man somewhere between forty and sixty, his hair going grey at the temples stood up from the table.

"What is this, then, Zora? You've brought some _gadze_ friends to honor us?" Zora responded in the language she spoke with the old woman, but the man stopped her. "English, Zora. Don't be rude."

Her eyes flashed at Dean, but then down again. She explained to him what had happened at her _ofisa_, her office, and that this one, indicating Dean, had taken offence and demanded to talk to the _Rom baro_. She showed him the piece of silver. "That one," nodding towards Sam, "crossed my palm with this."

"You didn't like your fortune, maybe?" he asked them. He shrugged. "Zora is young. Perhaps she was mistaken." He offered the silver back.

Dean looked at it, and back up at the man. "You're the _Rom baro_?"

The man's eyes narrowed on Dean. "I am."

"May I have your name?"

He took a deep breath, and let his hand with the silver fall. "Thomas Cooper."

Some tension let out of Dean as if this was a barrier overcome. "My name is Dean Winchester. This is my brother, Sam. My father is John Winchester." The man's eyes flickered, he recognized the name. Dean saw it too, Sam knew, but he didn't press. "Do you know the Grant _familia_, in Ohio?"

"I know people who know them."

"Check with them. They'll tell you."

"What will they tell me?"

Dean took a deep breath. "They call John Winchester the _Gadze Rom_. He did them a service, and they declared him _vujo_."

Zora stiffened beside him. Sam heard the shift in his brother's voice, saw it in his body language. Dean was usually so aggressively Dean that he seemed, if not oblivious, then at least uncaring of what other people thought of his behavior. Their few entrances into 'polite' society usually only made him act even more deliberately boorish.

Not here. He didn't know precisely what Dean was doing, but it was like he was pulling on another skin. Or revealing another layer. Sam couldn't have said, just then, which it was, truth or fiction, but one thing was evident. Dean cared what these people thought of him.

"What service did he do that is worth this?" Thomas Cooper asked, but Sam could see hesitation in him for the first time. If this was a contest, Dean was winning.

Dean shook his head. "Ask them."

"And if this is true, what do you want from me?"

Dean looked at Zora, and back at Cooper. "An apology. Your women insulted both me and my brother."

Cooper nodded. "I will consider it." He offered his hand to Dean, which he hadn't when he had introduced himself. Dean seemed to acknowledge the significance of this, shook hands with him as if sealing a bargain. Cooper offered his hand to Sam in turn, and Sam shook it.

They were escorted out of the trailer. Dean interrupted Zora as she gestured to the rest of the camp, offering them hospitality as guests. Dean suggested they would rather wait for the _Rom baro's_ decision at the campground's nearby motel. It would give them a chance to shower and rest. Zora didn't object to this decision or try to persuade them to stay.

x x x

"Now, Dean? Is this a good time?" Sam turned around to face him, first in the room, before Dean had the door closed. "Can I buy a fucking clue, now?"

Dean stepped around his brother and threw his bag on the bed. Sam had been patient up until now. There was no hope, now that they were alone, of putting off the inevitable any longer. "What do you want to know?"

Sam slammed the door shut. "Oh, _everything_."

"Even I don't know everything." It was a poor joke, and Sam took it predictably poorly, all hunched shoulders and _don't mess with me – I'm not joking around here, Dean_ attitude. "All right. Just –" _Give me a minute_. He handed Sam the salt from his bag, and kicked off his shoes.

He sat on the bed as Sam laid down the salt lines.

Sam handed back the box when he'd finished, Dean put it away, both of them moving so automatically it was almost ritual.

"Talk to me, man," Sam said, his anger gone, or put away for now. He leaned his back up against the cupboards of the small kitchenette, hands on the countertop, probably completely unaware of how he made it look like dollhouse furniture.

Dean closed his eyes, and rubbed at an eyebrow. Long forgotten memories were swirling around inside him and it was hard to find the tail of one to grab hold.

"We stayed with a Romani family for a year. You were two. Or three. Walking, anyway. Running, usually. That's why you don't remember it."

Sam as a toddler. Sammy. Which made Dean all of six, or seven. Hard to imagine, nowadays. Had he ever been that young? And their father was still new to the hunt. As far as Dean was able to piece together, John had come looking for the Romani, looking for their 'old stories' and what they could tell him of things supernatural. Dean was never sure how he managed it, but John had wormed his way in. In the process, Dean and Sam were brought in as well.

Sam stared at him. "A year?"

Dean nodded, and put his hands behind his head, laying down and staring at the ceiling. A year where if Sammy fell down, there was always someone else around to pick him up. Where there was always food on the table and no one expected him to prepare it. Where Dean had four boys his own age to play with, a dozen older boys around, and nearly unlimited freedom. A year where if their father drank too much he did it in the company of other men; other men who took it in stride to carry him to his bed, and not leave him for Dean to handle. A year where Dean learned to fish and swim in the river, to steal apples from some farmer's orchard, to ride the horses they found left out in the field overnight, bareback and sometimes without even a halter rope.

All in all, pretty much a paradise for a young boy.

"A year," Sam said again, differently, his voice soft. "Why so long?" It was unheard of that they were tied so long in one place.

Dean shook his head. "I don't know, really." Their father had a way of discouraging questions. "Maybe it took him that long to get what he wanted from them."

"You never said anything about it, before."

"It didn't come up."

Sam's face clouded, not accepting that answer, but Dean didn't want to discuss it further. Not that part. "Being Romani – being an outsider amongst the Romani – it's complicated," he said. "They don't like outsiders, what they call _gadze_. It's all based around this idea of being pure – _vujo_ – or being contaminated – _marime_ – which is what everything outside of Romani is usually considered."

"Which sounds like they're prejudiced against us, rather than the other way around."

"It's just their way, Sam. You may as well ask why Jews don't eat pork, or Hindus beef. It is a different culture, with different rules."

"So what did Dad do that got him declared pure and accepted into the tribe?"

"The _familia_, not really a tribe. The family. Everything with the Rom is about the family. I don't know, Sam. I was six. I didn't ask. He might have hunted something for them, or come across them in the pursuit of something else. You know what you were saying earlier, about people accepting it into their lives, instead of denying? Only the Romani have never denied the supernatural. They live with their spirits and ghosts in everyday life. They're known around the world for fortune-telling and palm-reading. They do curses, and spiritual healing."

"No wonder Dad wanted to get to know them."

Dean nodded. To use them. Mine them for information.

"So who is this _Rom baro_?"

"He's sort of a clan chief. Judge and mayor and mafia godfather, all in one. Not just of this family, but of all the related and nearby families as well."

"And Dad didn't write any of this in his journal?"

Dean shook his head. "I don't know, Sam. Maybe he did, and then took it out again. You know how he –" Dean shrugged. Blew hot and cold. Pissed people off. Held grudges. For all Dean knew the Grants in Ohio could be giving Cooper an earful of what an asshole John Winchester had turned out to be.

"You speak the language?"

Dean shook his head again. "I'm remembering a few words. It's been more than twenty years."

"Two days, Dean. You set me up. You set all this up. Why?"

"We have to get inside the camp before we can even begin to look for Kayla."

Sam raked his hands through his hair, and paced the length of their small room. "Why, Dean? Why can't you just tell me?"

Dean threw an arm over his eyes. Sam had the right to ask, and he wasn't likely to give up on it, Dean knew. But he didn't have a simple answer. Just coming into the Romani camp was bringing up a lot of memories Dean had thought forgotten. The names of his friends back then, the feelings of before, and after, and during his stay with them. Just trying to come up with words to identify feelings always seemed to bring those feelings closer to the surface, when you were usually better off just not feeling them at all.

"You had Stanford. I had the Grants in Ohio." A year of freedom, and uncluttered childhood.

Before was a haze of running and hiding, confusion and fear and hugging Sam close to him every night, willing him to be silent because Daddy was mad, and if maybe Dean could do this right, the hiding and the running and minding Sam, then maybe Daddy would forget everything else that Dean did wrong and made him so mad. After was Dean knowing his role, knowing to say _yes, sir_ and knowing that what Dad did was necessary and he loved them even if he never said it.

During… He wasn't like other kids, but the Romani boys weren't like them either. They were outsiders all together, where Old World prejudices had followed the Romanies to America, and they themselves steadfastly refused assimilation. The laws and judgment of the outside world held as little sway with them as it did with John Winchester.

During was light, and safety, and acceptance. During was adults who treated him as one of their own, a kid, and not as a combination of particularly retarded recruit and nanny. Adults, especially mothers, who took his devotion to Sammy as perfectly natural and right, but wouldn't let him shoulder his care alone, instead shooing him off to 'go play'. During was Sammy spending the days under their watch, blooming from babyhood into boyhood, learning to laugh again.

"I wanted to go home, too, you know," Dean continued. "I wanted our normal life back. I knew Mom was dead and that she wasn't coming back. I mean – eventually, I knew that. But I wanted to go home and start over, I guess. I didn't understand what we were doing, moving all the time, what we were running from. Then while we stayed with the Grants – I don't know – I guess I learned that there was another kind of normal. Whenever we traveled, and we didn't so much, but sometimes… I'd see other people, normal people, looking and judging and not understanding. It was like – I could see both sides. I was Romani – at least at that point I must have looked exactly like one of them – and I was _gadze_, all at the same time."

Which still didn't really answer Sam's question, Dean knew. Sam had retreated to one corner of the room as Dean spoke, Dean's searching look finding him there in the shadows. Sam sat, elbows on knees and hands pressed flatly together, not looking at him, which made it easier in some ways, but listening intently.

"You _belonged_ there," Sam said, not looking up.

"No," Dean said, sitting up. _Dammit, Sam_. "This isn't about me. It's about them. About being Romani. They have this –" he shook his head, trying to come up with some way to explain. "This _thing_ about family." And that didn't even come close to describing it. "They don't have a country, or a government. No kings or queens or presidents, nothing like that. All they have is family. Thomas Cooper there, the _Rom baro._ It means 'big man'. He wasn't elected and he didn't inherit it. As far as I know it is just one of those things people know. He is the leader. It means he's accepted by all his relatives as the natural leader, the one to go to if they ever need help, for anything. Not just his relatives, but by all the different families around here, who might be more or less intermarried anyway."

Dean searched the ceiling for inspiration, bad move, then got up and started pacing. "Children are everything to them. Wealth, future, continuity, status, you name it. For a Romani child to end up in care, adopted out to a non-Romani family – god, I can't imagine what must have happened to her birth family. She should have had other family to take care of her. But to take her back, to kidnap the others –" Dean turned to his brother. "There is something really wrong here, Sam. I don't know if Kayla's here or not –" He stopped, as if running out of words. As if he couldn't force the words he did have into shapes that meant what he meant.

"This is important to you," Sam said. "I get that."

And it still felt like he was opening a vein. "I owe them."

There was a knock at the door before Sam could respond.

Zora. She looked down at the line of salt on the floor and up at them as Sam opened the door wide, inviting her in. She shook her head, and stepped back. "Oh, I couldn't," she said. "The _Rom baro_ has made his decision."

x x x

_Pachiv!_ They were honored guests and they would have a party! It all happened so quickly Sam and Dean were left literally standing in the dust, as they collected names and handshakes and pats on the back. The _Rom baro_ said they were in, and they were in. The word went out quickly, and the whole community started to gather for the evening's feast and festivities.

Sam would have been more comfortable if Cooper himself hadn't kept watching them out of the corner of his eye. But the Romani welcome was genuine enough. They were both pulled over to the men's table, leaving all preparations to the women, who swirled about talking and laughing, as if delighted at the thought of putting on a party on a moment's notice.

Everyone seemed to live outdoors for the most part, and communally, as if their trailers were just sleeping quarters. Laundry hung out on lines, and every trailer had outdoor cooking, cleaning and eating areas, sheltered under various shade structures. Some tarps, some wooden, some layered palm fronds. The campground suffered from the desert more than anything, but the people seemed to place little emphasis on maintaining what little landscaping had ever been there. The cacti were dying from too much water, and the flowers from too little. The only green grass visible was the plastic variety, laid down in front of doorways in a vain attempt to stop the worst of the dust and sand from getting inside.

The men were everywhere from thirty to seventy years in age, dark haired, and mustache-growing looked like an Olympic sport they took very seriously. Sam and Dean were offered cigarettes, which they turned down, and shots of a clear liquid, which they accepted, which burned from _before_ it hit the lips, all the way down, and for about ten minutes afterward. Sam got pounded on the back for his attempt, until he didn't know if the tears in his eyes were from the liquor, the coughing, or the beating. God, that stuff was poisonous.

He laughed out loud at Dean's expression as talk around the table quickly turned to the Impala, and how much Dean wanted for the car. Shame about the color, black was unlucky, but it could be repainted. Offers started ranging into the ridiculous with the other men catcalling the others' prices – don't listen to him, he doesn't have two shiny nickels to rub together.

Cars started arriving as it was getting dark, more families spilling out of them loaded down with more food. It was all shared around a communal table, made from pulling the various small picnic tables together. Some of the food Sam recognized, some he didn't. Cabbage rolls were cabbage rolls whether they were called _sarma_ or not. He ate his fill, and then his plate was filled again. He ate most of that too until he couldn't eat any more. By that time the liquor was just nicely warming as it seemed to refill itself in his glass as if by magic.

He and Dean were seated near the head of the table, and the _Rom baro_, who held court over the proceedings for the whole evening like an old-fashioned baron or lord. Sam had to blink hard when Zora appeared in front of them, in the space between the two arms of lined up tables. Everyone turned to look at her.

She stood with her head down and hands clasped in front.

"Our honored guests, the two sons of the _Gadze Rom_, John Winchester, have demanded only one thing of us," Cooper said, standing up. "This woman, and Old Mother Elena, insulted them. Called them _marime._" He thumped hard on the table. "They are not. The women will apologize. This is the word of the _Rom baro_." He sat, and all attention shifted to Zora, like a spotlight, with shifting glances given to him and Dean.

Zora spoke clearly, if not loudly. She didn't need to. Everyone was paying attention. Her apology was articulate and apparently heartfelt, completely without bitterness. Sam wondered what she made of all this, what the _Rom baro_ had said to her to put her out there in front of them all, when she wasn't the one who had insulted him, if he had been actually insulted, and it had been a set-up from the start.

Had Dean known? Dean wasn't looking at him though, and Sam couldn't gauge his reaction to the further humiliation of the girl. Dean stood, his hand on Sam's shoulder as if indicating solidarity, "My brother and I," when in fact his elbow was locked, preventing Sam from moving, at least without causing a scene. "My brother and I are glad to accept your apology."

Old Mother Elena, on the other hand, shouted and spat at them, when attention turned to her. Sam looked around a little for someone to translate the long stream of Romani for him, but the others just looked away as if embarrassed by the old woman. "Don't listen to her," Cooper said, sitting down after Elena stalked away. "She is no one. All her children died or went to the _gadze._ She will leave no one when she dies." It sounded like a curse, to Sam, but Cooper said it like it was truth. Or that there was no difference.

Sam heard it whispered, at first from the women, accompanied by sneaking glances and laughs muffled behind fingers. _Pilivani._ Heads turned their way, and away, and it went around the table as supper was breaking up. _Pilivani_. Then some of the men caught it, and Sam found them standing in groups of three or four, staring and him and Dean like they were being measured for show and sale.

Sam leaned over to Dean. "What is _pilivani_?" he hissed.

Cooper's head swung towards them, in the middle of lighting a pipe. "_Pilivani_?" A smile split his face, making his mustache seem twice the size. Excellent idea! "_Pilivani_!" he called loudly to the whole group, and slapped loudly on the table as he stood. This is the word of the _Rom baro_. The rest of the crowd cheered. Sam raised an eyebrow at his brother, who shook his head. He didn't know either.

People and tables were cleared away until Sam and Dean were left standing by themselves. One guy, easily as tall as Sam, and half again as broad, pointed at Dean. Sam recognized him as Cooper's de facto second in command, if the seating rank at the table was anything to go by.

_Me_? Dean pantomimed, with one finger at his own chest. "Wasn't me. I wasn't there. I didn't know she was married."

The crowd laughed appreciatively. They were perched variously in lawn chairs, on the tables, or on the ground. An audience.

"_Pilivani._ You," the man said, and started undoing the buttons of his shirt.

"Wrestling," Zora offered, standing beside them. "It is challenge wrestling."

Awful helpful of her, Sam thought, exchanging a glance with Dean. Considering. He didn't forget that it was her they had followed across most of the country. There was too much he didn't know, and less he understood. Maybe the _Rom baro's_ word was law around here. But Zora didn't strike him as exactly powerless, either.

Dean held up one hand, cocked his head, as if to decline.

"You have to," Zora said, sotto voce and without looking at him. Friendly advice, without it looking like they were taking directions from a girl. "This is status. This is a test, a challenge. Even if you lose, you have to compete."

Keep your enemies closer, Sam thought.

The man stood shirtless now, and the women around him dipped their hands into a quart sized tub of lard, then started spreading the white stuff over the man's chest, back and arms. Soon enough, a couple of the other women offered the same to Dean, who took in Sam's grin with a glint in his eye, as he shed his own shirt. Sam's turn was coming, he promised.

Greased wrestling. The object being to force some part of your opponent's upper body to the ground. No punching, pinching, kicking. Upper body contact only, and that upper body slicked with oil.

It was harder than it looked, with Dean's grip sliding off the other man's torso and arms just when he thought he had him pinned. At the same time, Dean quickly picked on this advantage for himself when the bigger man had him in a full bear hug, twisting free like butter melting, going down on one knee and up again. The man ended up hugging air. The crowd loved it. They met again like two bulls, heads pushing into shoulders, arms grappling for grip. Dean finally pulled a move that Sam recognized as more judo than wrestling, dropping his shoulder and letting his opponent's weight and momentum carry him to the ground.

Dean was offered drinks and cheers for his victory. The loser grunted and shook Dean's hand, accepting defeat good-naturedly.

"Two-handed grips," Dean advised freely, the kick of even ersatz combat in his voice when it came to Sam's turn to be slathered in lard. "One-handed just –" He made a sliding motion with one hand. "Don't let him grab you around the chest or waist."

The fat was chilled, and the first few strokes raised goose pimples before it warmed to body temperature. The two women helping him, both of them grey-haired and wattled like turkeys, apparently found this reaction hilarious. They patted and stroked his arms and chest, chattering and laughing ceaselessly in Romani, like the words 'personal space' didn't actually translate to them. Or like he was the greased pig in the greased pig catching contest.

Sam's opponent was more Dean's size, a kid about eighteen. He looked at Sam with sharp spikes of hatred and resentment in his eyes. Sam nearly stepped back, looking at the boy's face, all kinds of warnings going off at once. He knew better than to be playing at something where his opponent was deadly serious. At the same time, deadly serious the boy could well be, and Sam wasn't ready to put that on the line when this was supposed to be some ritualized form of combat to establish social status.

Dean somehow missed it, sending Sam out into the ring with a slap on the back. "Don't make him look bad," his brother said, and threw back the shot handed to him.

Sam tried to loosen the kink in his neck as he and the boy warily circled each other. It wasn't working. Neither was the friendly smile on his face, as the hatred in the boy's eyes turned murderous. Sam slipped sideways and down as the kid came at him, letting him skim off his back without being able to hold and grab. The kid was untrained, but agile enough that he stayed on his feet. He twisted and turned at the end of a couple stumbled steps and came right back at Sam.

They ended up in the same position Dean had in his fight, faces nearly pressed together, pushing and pulling at each other trying to gain the leverage necessary to twist an arm behind, or to wrap his arms around the other's limb or chest. Nothing seemed to work.

Sam blinked at the grease running into his eyes. It made his vision cloudy, and the boy seemed to waver in outline. The more exertion warmed his body the more the fat ran, but it covered his hands and by now coated most of his hair and he couldn't wipe it away. Dust stirred up by their feet filmed them, and the grease carried it into his mouth, hair and eyes. Sam's head started to pound, as well, just to go along with the jumbled images coming from his streaming eyes.

He could hear the crowd stamping their feet, and chanting his name. Some were chanting another. Stefan. Stefan. Stefan.

"Okay, Sammy, any time now." Dean's voice cut through the crowd noise and drum beating in his head as if his brother was standing beside him.

Sam shook his head, then his arms moved, grabbing the boy around his chest, shift weight, twist of the hips, down on his knee and he pinned the kid's shoulders to the ground.

Stefan didn't accept Sam's offer of a hand up. Instead he scrambled to his feet and walked away from the gathering.

"Took your time," Dean said, offering a towel. "I know I said –"

"I know what you said." Sam scrubbed his face, glowering. He hadn't been holding back, or making a show. "Who was that?" Sam asked Zora, indicating the boy's stiff retreating back.

"The old woman's grandson." She shrugged. "He's always been a prick. He deserved to get beat." She blushed at Sam's stare. "What, I can't say 'prick'?"

"I don't know. Can you?" The rules of the culture Sam had seen so far seemed pretty restrictive and conservative. Women's roles seemed sharply delineated, as were the men's for that matter. But that wasn't what he'd been about to ask. Was it? He couldn't remember now. His headache was getting worse.

"We're not a museum display. We're real people. We watch TV, and we have to work and interact with you _gadze_ all the time."

"We're still _gadze_?"

"It's not an insult. It just means not Romani. You have to be born Romani."

"And what if a child is born Romani, but then goes to the _gadze_?"

Zora looked away. "Then they are lost. Like they are dead."

Dean's turn again, another challenger.

"You don't wear the _mulengi dori_?" Zora asked, breaking the silence between them.

"The what?"

She indicated the knotted and twisted strips of leather on her wrist. "_Mulengi dori_. Umm, 'dead man's strings' is the literal translation, though that doesn't really mean what it means. They're charms. For protection. Blessing of your ancestors. Your brother wears them. I just wondered why you don't."

Sam stared. Dean had three around his right wrist, almost identical to Zora's. He noticed then that several of the Romani men were wearing them. And women. "I used to," Sam admitted. "I went away to school. They broke. Wore out." At Stanford, when he'd realized the leather strings he'd always worn were gone, though he couldn't remember losing them, he'd felt naked and exposed. He'd replaced them with a bit of plastic bought on a street corner in San Francisco, just to feel the weight there on his wrist. Completely not understanding what he'd lost.

It stung him, metaphor and reality crashing together. It was just something he'd always had, from before he could remember. Whenever one would wear out or break, Dad had given him a new one, within a few days. Sam never questioned why or how. It was just something they did. This thing, this Gypsy thing was part of him, part of the Winchesters, and he hadn't known anything about it.

"You went away? From your family?" Zora questioned. She sounded like he'd admitted to flying to the moon. Sam nodded. "Why?"

"I don't remember, now." He didn't. He remembered it had been important then. It had seemed so important, then. Getting away, having a normal, safe life. Worth all the pain and the arguments and the separation. Worth leaving Dean, even. But he honestly didn't remember _why_ it had seemed so important, been so, back then.

"People are strange," Zora said, shrugging, and turning back to the fight in time to see Dean dump the other guy on his butt, to more cheers and raised glasses.

_You don't love me, not the way I love you._ Sam's nightmare came back to him, as he watched Dean drink in the approval and appreciation of the Romani family even after he had defeated one of their own.

Dean came back to him and took back the glass Sam had been holding. He drained it, wiped away sweat and grease from his face.

"Dude, you look like you swallowed a herring. Halfway." _What's up?_

Sam choked out a laugh. "Jerk. Was I even there, while we were growing up?" _How can I not know this stuff about my own life?_

The question didn't seem to throw Dean, though he chewed on his answer for a couple moments before speaking. He didn't ask where this was coming from, or what Sam meant. "You were a kid." As if that explained everything.

"So were you."

"Not for a long time."

_It's been a long time since I was a kid, and I wasn't one for long_, Sam interpreted. That economy of emotion and thought was all Dean. Not shielded, not now, no mask and no attempt to divert him. It was bare, spare truth.

"I'm sorry," Sam said. He might never get another chance to say it, and here, now, it just came out. Dean was about as unguarded as he ever got and – this one time – he might actually be able to hear what Sam wanted to say. _I'm sorry for walking away. I'm sorry I never understood what all this meant. I'm sorry you had to go through it all for me. I'm sorry this is all my fault._

But no. Dean's eyes shuttered closed and the walls went up. He took a step back from Sam. "Don't."

Sam closed his eyes, willing his hands to his sides. One step forward and two steps back.

Sam became aware of the other people surrounding them, some of them stamping their feet again. One half of the crowd called his name. The other half, or more than half, called Dean's.

Sam was tempted. Usually, they didn't spar to win. They worked out, they practiced moves. They kept the knives sharp and the guns oiled and worked at covering each other's backs. But Sam found he was curious. If it ever came down to it. Who would win?

Dean's face held no humor when Sam glanced to see what he thought of the idea. Dean's face might have been carved from stone for all the likelihood of a smile moving it right now.

The temptation to thrash some sense into his brother came and went about once a day. Some days, more. Sam didn't doubt Dean felt the same. 24/7 in each other's company and they were bound to want to kill each other at least that often. This, though – _pilivani_ – it was just a physical contest. There were no stakes here beyond bragging rights between brothers. What could it hurt?

And if he managed to pin Dean to the ground, and _make him _listen to an apology, all the better.

"No!" Zora said sharply, moving out into the circle and admonishing the crowd. "No. Brothers should not fight. It is _bibaxt._ Bad luck."

The crowd looked ashamed, some of them nodding at Zora's outburst. Despite her age, they seemed to take her seriously, and her word carried weight.

The wrestling and drinking went on, but with Sam and Dean not offered any further challenges the novelty was wearing off and people drifted away. Sam was handed a towel to take off the worst of the grease before shrugging his shirt on again.

Zora was right. Fighting with Dean was a really bad idea. He didn't know why he kept doing it.

He'd drunk enough of that foul liquor that it took an effort of will to stand, deciding that enough was enough and it was time to head back to the motel room. Dean was nowhere to be seen but Sam wasn't worried. Dean belonged here, with the Romani. Dean fit in here as he did almost nowhere else. Dean was happy here. Had been happy, here.

And if Dean was after some girl he'd no doubt be disappointed to find out that all of them over the age of twelve were already married. Not that there were any girls –

Which for some reason made Sam's head start hurting again. Something about a twelve year old girl – and something Sam should be doing – something they should be doing – but it too much to think through the cloud of alcohol and the throbbing in his head.

Definitely time to hit the sack.

Except for the young man standing in his way. Sam excused himself and went to walk around, but then he was standing there again. Sam blinked, fighting the nausea starting to creep up from his stomach. Goddamn that whatever he had been drinking. It had a kick like a pile driver. The boy wavered in outline, and Sam finally placed him. Stefan. The old woman's grandson. Except she didn't have a grandson. She would leave no one behind when she died.

"Who are you?"

Instead of answering the boy stepped closer, his eyes the only sharply focused part that Sam could see. His eyes that stabbed him with hate. "Go away. You're not wanted here. Dirty _gadzo_."

Sam flinched away. He couldn't help it, pain like nails driven into his skull, and he crumpled. The boy pushed him to the ground with one hand, as if that proved something, as if they were still wrestling. Sam panted for breath, fought against the blackness crowding in at his temples. "Christo," he breathed, though he didn't know what he would do if he was right. He couldn't exactly defend himself if attacked by a demon right now.

Stefan leaned over as if Sam was something vaguely disgusting found under a rock. "What is that? Christo? I don't know what that means."

"Get Dean, please." Sam didn't care if he was begging. If it wasn't coming from the kid…. "My brother. Please."

The kid sniffed. And walked away.

x x x

"No!" Zora said sharply, moving out into the circle and admonishing the crowd. "No. Brothers should not fight. It is _bibaxt._ Bad luck."

Dean looked up from wiping the melted lard off his face to find his first challenger in front of him. He was dressed again, and looked none the worse for wear. Dean was still feeling the effects of his second bout. A little tired, one arm wrenched from where he'd freed himself from his opponent's grasp, but warmed up. Ready to go. If this fucker wanted a rematch outside of the polite rules of _pilivani_ –

"The _Rom baro_ speaks to you."

"Yeah, so?"

The man nodded, indicating a direction. Behind Dean, away from the crowd. Dean opened his mouth to alert Sam, and the big man shook his head in warning. "Just you." There were two other men now between Dean and his brother, somehow inserting themselves so that neither noticed.

"Fine."

He let the other man lead him into the dark, away from the fire. Dean counted four other bodies moving with them in the same direction, but they made little effort to quiet their steps. He didn't trust them exactly, but men intent on some sort violence tended to walk more on the balls of their feet. Not the heavy tromp he heard clearly from the others.

They stopped. Far enough away from any of the trailers that they would not be overheard talking. Shouts would carry, probably farther in the clear desert air than these guys realized, but would not likely be readily intelligible. Dean rubbed his own arms, becoming aware that it was dark, it was December, and even in Yuma fucking Arizona it was cold out at night without a shirt. "What is this about?"

Tom Cooper stepped out of the shadows. "John Winchester hunts the Black Dog," he said without preliminaries.

Dean flinched. He couldn't help it. Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't that.

"Is that a 'yes'?"

"I didn't know it was a question," Dean bit out. Mention of his father and he got testy. What of it? Clandestine meetings leaving him unarmed and outnumbered weren't the best way to get on his good side either. "Black Dogs aren't usually worth the trouble of hunting them down."

"Not Black Dogs. Those are no hurt to anyone. They just bring notice, yes? Warning, even, to those with the eyes to see them. I think you know this, yes?"

Dean waited.

"_The_ Black Dog. The name Winchester is known to the Romani, the one who fights back. The one who hunts instead of being hunted by. And now his two sons are grown to men themselves." Cooper nodded. "This is a good thing. _Zor_. Strong."

Dean knew the Romani _zor_ meant a lot of different things, not just strength. Healthy. Lucky. Powerful.

"We do not fight the Black Dog. It has come for us, come for our children, many times over the centuries. We run, we hide, and we have our ways to protect us. Now you're here. I'm asking you. Is this thing come for my _familia?_ Is that why you're here?"

Cooper looked like he was a cancer patient, steeling himself for a bad news, and Dean was the surgeon that could cut the evil from him. The only question was how much it was going to hurt. And how much it was going to cost. "No," Dean said. "No, I don't think so. We were on the trail of – something else."

"What 'something else'?" Cooper's lieutenant demanded. "It is your brother that brought you here, yes?"

"Costin, here, listens to old women too much," Cooper said with comfortable distain. Costin, though, was not about to be put off and snapped back at the _Rom baro_ in rapid Romani.

"What about my brother?"

"The old woman says he is touched by the Black Dog," Costin said. "He is cursed. _Marime_. He poisons the _dji_ of the _familia_ just by being here."

Two of the men stepped in front of Dean as he was about to launch himself at Costin, just long enough for Dean to gather the satisfied glimmer in Cooper's expression.

He stuffed his anger down. Cooper was playing both sides. Smart. If the Winchesters were here hunting, then Cooper would allow them to clean up whatever evil was infecting his family. If the Winchesters were themselves some worse danger, then the Romani were capable of defending themselves.

"You're wrong," Dean said, finally. "My brother is strong."

"I hope so," Cooper said. "For all our sakes." He nodded to the men to let Dean go, and they parted.

In time for a young boy, a child of maybe six to run up to them. He pulled at one of the men's hands. "Dad, hurry! The tall one. He's sick!"

x x x

Sam felt hands hauling him up, and a familiar voice in his ear. He couldn't make out the words though, and his vision swam so badly that he kept his eyes shut tight. "Sorry," he tried, but he didn't know if it came out properly or not. It didn't seem to make the gouging pain in his head any better. Or any worse.

He recognized the bed as he fell on it. Horizontal was much better than vertical. Not moving was much, much better than the shuffling movement of before. Better still was the abrupt lack of light assaulting him as if every square inch of his skin was on fire.

But voices intruded into his blessed pain-free cloud. Two voices. They were trying to be quiet, but the hissed anger in them was almost worse than shouting. Sam risked opening one eye, then the other. Dean, standing beside the bed. Sam could only see the back of his brother's jeans, he was standing so close, but the second voice belonged to a woman, standing in full view closer to the door. Special Agent Angela Leahy.

Her gaze caught his, shifting down from Dean. "He's awake, now," she said, with some triumph.

x

x

x

…tbc…

x x x

a/n: What I describe of Romani life is as much a result of my imagination as it is of honest research. Don't take my word for it, especially in the context of this TV series. _Gypsies: The Hidden Americans_, by Anne Sutherland, and _We Are The Romani People_, by Dr. Ian Hancock, were my main sources along with what I found on the web. Google "Patrin" and "Romani" for a great place to start. (-ffnet hates links.)

BigPink and elanurel are both slave-drivers in the form of betas, greeting me with 'Are you done yet?' instead of hello. So the only reason this didn't take even longer is because of them. And you probably didn't want to see the first few versions of this. Any incoherency remaining is my fault for not listening more closely to them.

For fawning and adulation, please press the button below.

For constructive criticism, please leave a review.

For 'what-the-hell-were-you-thinking', fanbot is still more reliable than telepathy.

Thank you.


	4. Thunderstruck

For Once, Then, Something

Sam and Dean track a missing Romani girl across the country, only to end up in Yuma fucking Arizona and with the Romani _familia_ there. Sam's surprised to discover the Winchester family's connection with the culture. The Gypsies have their own secrets however, and hidden power.

a/n: As always, better beta'd by BigPink and elanurel.

x x x

_Chapter 4: Thunderstruck_

Dean found Sam on the ground, curled fetally around himself, his hands fisted into his hair. He keened, just barely audible – a sound that sent a shiver straight down Dean's spine. "Sam. Sammy." Pupils; dilated, but equal. Breathing; shallow, rapid. But breathing. Thank God. "Sammy!" No blood. No wounds. No bruising.

"Sammy, please!" Sam's bloodshot eyes opened, and he moaned, squeezing them shut.

"You want a doctor?"

Dean looked up and around. Several of the Romani men stood around him. They'd followed him from the meeting in the dark, and now more people were joining the crowd. The offer came from Costin, the big man who had just accused Sam of being contaminated, and a danger to the whole _familia._ "No," Dean decided. "Help me get him back to the room."

It took the two of them to uncurl Sam's hands from himself, to pull his arms out enough that he could be suspended between them. "Sam! It's me," he called when his brother continued to struggle. That seemed to penetrate, and he collapsed like someone had let the air out.

"'ean…"

Sam's head flopped from side to side, and his feet mostly dragged on the ground, occasionally he would manage to pick them up for a reflexive step.

"'msorry," Sam said, almost intelligibly, into Dean's neck. "'msorry." Again and again.

_Shut up_, Dean thought in response. Begged. _Shut up, shut up, shut up_.

But when they got to the motel room, the door was open, and the inside lights were on. They both saw the woman standing in the middle of the shabby motel room. She turned, hearing them, fastidious and suspicious as a cat with wet paws. Costin stepped back as Dean stepped across the threshold, Sam's weight slung across his shoulders with one arm.

Dean thanked Costin for the help with a spare glance, and the Gypsy accepted. Accepted, too, that this was _gadze_ business, this woman in his room. Maybe even recognized her as government or police, or the worst combination of the two, because he drifted back from the door and disappeared into the dark like an apparition.

Dean laid Sam on the bed as gently as possible, which wasn't very, considering his size and state of consciousness. He lifted Sam's feet onto the bed, trying to roll him over into something resembling a comfortable position. Sam kept up his streaming apology, though it was only intelligible now because Dean had heard it all before, reduced to "S'ry, s'ry."

"Another mind-reading performance? A bit of coal to Newcastle, isn't it?" Agent Leahy asked, one eyebrow arched.

Dean smoothed the hair out of his brother's eyes, skin too pale, feeling maybe the start of clammy sweat? When he turned his head to the side, Dean saw a trickle of blood from his ear. Sammy moaned again, hiding his eyes as if the light hurt him.

The FBI agent flinched as Dean moved suddenly toward her, reached around her to the switch on the wall. Dean flicked off the overhead light, went back to the bed.

"I looked at that fabric ball thing you found," Leahy went on. "Guess what I found?"

Sam seemed to relax a bit with the light off, his breathing growing deeper and the scrunched up muscle reflex against pain loosening. Dean kept his hand over Sam's heart, even knowing that the neck pulse was a more reliable indicator of his brother's health. Even so.

"Yucca pollen. Along a list of other things. Strange things."

Intracranial pressure. Cracked skull. Bleeding into the brain – what did they call that? Subdural hematoma. That could cause blood from the ear. None of which were good news. None of which he could do fuck all about with the piddly-assed first aid kit. Sammy quit with the mumbled apology, at least. Dean didn't know if that was a good sign or not. Was he slipping deeper into unconsciousness? That was the bad end of the head injury spectrum, he knew from too much time in too many emergency rooms. Though, raking experienced fingers carefully across his scalp, he couldn't find any evidence that Sam had hit his head. Or that someone had hit it for him.

"Is he sick?"

Call the ambulance or dump him in the car and go like hell? Dean spared her one daggered look over his shoulder. "What are you doing here?"

"That yucca species only grows around here."

Dean stared at her. He understood Romani better than he did her. Christ, he understood Swahili better than he did her. "Here. In our room. What are you doing in our room?"

"Does he need a doctor? He doesn't look –"

"Get out." He stood, facing her.

Agent Leahy stiffened, and Dean saw the pistol holstered under her arm. She apparently remembered it too. "I am a federal officer in pursuit of my duties and I believed I had sufficient grounds –"

"Get out," Dean hissed again. Weapon or no – she was leaving. "She's not here. She was never here. We didn't take her."

"I need to know how your brother knew –"

"GET OUT!" She blinked at him. The stupid bitch had no fucking idea of how close she was – he didn't like hitting women, but he was fully capable of tossing her out on her bony ass. Dean almost hoped she would pull the gun on him.

"He's awake, now," she said, her gaze shifting from him down to Sam.

"Sammy?" Back to hand on chest. Stronger.

Sam managed a moan in acknowledgement, though he quickly closed his eyes again. He flinched away from the touch, which was probably the best sign as Dean pushed his head aside, checking for more blood from his ears. Nothing. That was good. Better, anyway.

"Dude, not in front of the company," Sam muttered, his voice rasping, barely audible. Apparently complaining at Dean's continued touch, there over his heart. "What's she gonna think?"

Dean's hand fisted in his brother's shirt, restrained from shaking him so hard that he bounced. "You passed out, you bastard." Not to mention the whole bleeding from the ear thing. But after a second or two he let Sam's shirt go, forcing his fingers open.

"Can't handle my liquor like my big brother, is that what you want me to say? Fine. I said it. May your liver forgive you."

Dean swallowed, feeling his heart rate slowing, the fear and adrenaline fuelled need to hit something – federal agent or not – fading with Sam's words, evidence of functioning mental capability, and Sam's flicked glances up at him. Reassurance, warning.

"Mr. Winchester, I would like to ask you –" Agent Leahy started—

"Dean!" Sam barked, when Dean flowed up from the bed towards Leahy, liquid violence. It stopped him in his tracks when he likely would have done something… regrettable. "Don't threaten the nice FBI lady. I'll talk to her."

Dean shivered, the tsunami wave of reaction, wanting to strike out at something, anything, for Sam's pain, warred with the far more surface inhibition not to kill things nominally labeled human.

He slammed his way into the bathroom, rattling the door nearly out of its frame. Fine. Let Sam crack the jokes for a while. The FBI was following them, had found them halfway across the country from a kidnapped girl. Sammy was occasionally keeling over from psychic visions, bringing uncontrollable pain that attacked him from the inside and grew worse every time, to the point it nearly killed him. The people he had always thought of as _home_ and _safe_ had been plagued for centuries by something that stole children, something that his father knew and could very well be the same demon that was after the Winchesters. Was after Sam.

Let Sam crack the jokes for a while. Dean was fresh out.

He caught sight of himself in the mirror. Jesus. Dust caked every inch of his shirtless upper body except where it had been smudged and smeared from carrying Sam, leading to dark muddy streaks, paler patches, and raccoon eyes. It would have been effective outdoor camouflage, all in all, woody or rocky terrain, and he could probably use that information in the future. Right now – he turned on the shower. The sink and towels weren't going to cut it.

She was gone by the time he got out. Trust Sammy to silver tongue even FBI agents. Sam was awake, but he hadn't moved substantially from where Dean had left him. "You all right?" Dean asked, as he dressed, then started stuffing clothes into his bag.

"Been better," Sam said shortly. "Why do you –"

"Can you make it to the car, or am I going to have to carry you?"

"The car?" Sam questioned. Dean could see him putting the pieces together, and not liking the picture they made. If they'd been going to go to the E.R. they would have already been there by now, and it didn't usually involve Dean packing first. They were leaving town. Evidently Sam didn't think much of that idea. Well, tough. "Dean, no."

"I'm thinking San Diego. I say we throw everything in the car and spend a week at the beach. It's – what? – three hours from here?" _And it's not in goddamned Arizona._

It was worth a try, but Sam only looked at him as if wondering if he really meant what he said or was only making a joke. "You hate the beach."

_You don't._ There were definite advantages to the John Winchester style of conflict management. Yell at them, pull a gun on them, or just fucking ignore them. Either way people didn't _argue_ with you. Except Sammy. Sammy's dying breath was going to be at the tail end of some pointless argument. "We'll give the man his money back, but we are out of here."

"We're not running away, Dean."

"I'm not – " he denied hotly, started to, then realized that was probably exactly what it looked like. "We don't even know if Kayla's here, if she ever was here." _Fuck it, Winchester. Don't you fucking fold now._ Talking about the job was a tactical error, sabotaging his own plan. He hated that it looked like they were running away. That they were running away in everything but the motive sense.

They hadn't been here long enough to spread out, and it only took a sweep through the bathroom and they were packed. Sam had managed to sit up, though he hung onto the edge of the mattress as if to keep himself from toppling one way or the other. Carry it was, then.

Dean went down on one knee to sling Sam's arm over his shoulders. He'd come back for the bag. "I think she's here," Sam said. "Maybe the others, too."

Dean honestly didn't care. It was a shame about the little girl. Pity about the others, too. But he couldn't afford to worry about them. Whatever was going on here was spiking Sam's visions, and every time they got worse. That took up just about all the emotion Dean had to spare.

"You said these people were important to you. That you owed them."

Just about all. _Goddamn dirty pool, Sammy._ It was just as well Dean was already on his knees. The strength went out from under him and he let Sam's arm fall, let him stay sitting up on the bed.

He knew Sam watched every move as he pushed himself standing, away from Sam and away from the security of a tactical withdrawal. If there was any triumph on Sam's face for winning the argument, Dean didn't look to see it. He paced, and ran a hand through his hair. Maybe he should have hit the FBI woman. Whatever the consequences of that, at least he wouldn't be here, now. "How do you know she's here?"

"I don't know. I think so. I think this—" and he waved vaguely at his head, and Dean couldn't help the pissed off grimace. Of course it had to do with more fucking powers nonsense. "I don't think it was another vision," Sam went on, hurrying as if expecting Dean to shut him down.

"'Cause you didn't see anything." He tried to keep it under his breath, really.

"What was that hex like, in Kayla's room?" Sam asked, quickly.

"What was it _like_?" _Not following here, Sammy_.

"It made you stop thinking about her, right? Not forget, it didn't change memories, it just sort of made you forget to think about her."

"Yeah, I guess."

"And that was after it was damaged. We could still think around it, once we knew where to look. Once her parents realized, they didn't forget again."

Dean just raised his eyebrows at Sam. Yes, he needed to be led by the hand through this. Damn, he hated magic. Couldn't shoot it, burn it or bury it.

"What were we doing all day today? Especially after we got to the camp?"

"It was a party, Sam."

"Did you think about Kayla once? How likely is that we both completely forgot our mission?"

"So… is that what happened to you? You started thinking with that big goddamn brain of yours, and someone put the whammy on you?"

Sam cocked his head. "Maybe. Maybe it's a standing curse or spell, so that anyone who starts thinking about her – gets the whammy, as you call it."

"And now that we know – what? Are we safe?"

Sam grimaced, and slowly forced himself to stand. One long arm reached out for the wall to steady himself, but he managed to stay vertical. Dean managed to let him. "I don't know. I think – Kayla and whoever took her were three months gone by the time we got there, and it was still truly powerful. I think if we go back into the camp itself, we'll be caught in it again."

"So San Diego it is then." Dean stood, grabbed the bag.

"I'm sorry," Sam whispered. "I can't run away."

_Shit! Again with the apology. _Sam could barely stand, let alone run. They were _not_ going to do this. "You get in the fucking car, and I'll do the running away." Dean came up beside his brother, took up his arm again and steered them both toward the door.

"I know you're scared," Sam said, quietly fierce, not going to be stopped this time, not going to turned away. "I know that thing scared you. You can't let it win." Whispered, almost in his ear. Almost confessional. As if he was saying things he thought his brother couldn't. "We have to stay and fight this."

Dean let Sam's arm fall away, forced himself away from his brother. Who followed his every move with wounded, wet eyes. Two steps and he bumped into the wall. Had to stop there. "You know shit, Sammy."

"Yeah, that's right. I know shit. I know you've been different, ever since the accident. Since Dad left. Since _the Demon_. The Dean Winchester I know would never run."

Dean shook his head, looking in Sam's direction but somehow not actually looking at him. "You still know shit, Sammy. I'm not the one who's different."

"What does that mean?" Sam's voice was uncertain, perhaps fearful, for the first time.

"Did you see anything, get anything useful out of this last little – episode – of yours? 'Cause I gotta say, I'm getting really fucking tired of picking your ass off the floor for these _shit_ visions that tell us nothing." And that wasn't what he'd meant to say at all.

"No," Sam admitted, after a couple seconds. He closed his eyes. "I didn't see anything."

"That's what I mean. It's killing you, and it's doing us no good at all!" Dean's breath huffed worse than after a long run. "It's killing you." The words were out and it was too late to call them back. Worse, he wasn't even sure he wanted them back. Dean could _use _that look in his brother's face.

"I can't cover you on this! Don't you get that? Where you go – where you're going – I can't follow."

Sam wouldn't meet his look. But there was still no give in him. They couldn't run. Sam wouldn't give in. He wouldn't give up. All or nothing. All hunter, all the time, now.

Dean scrubbed one hand down his face. He knew this was going to be a disaster. Knew it, not like the way Sam saw his premonitions but knew it all the same. The way you knew the ending of some jokes you'd heard before, or movies that you'd never seen. Because it was all there in the setup and it was inevitable. There was no escape.

"One condition," Dean said finally. "We have to have a plan, and we stick to it."

"Of course."

"Not, 'of course', Sam. I mean it. You went down that un-whatever-gila tunnel when I told you to wait for me."

"Unhcegila," Sam said. "I thought it was going to get away."

Dean counted to ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Not to lash out like their father, because that _never_ worked. "I know that's what you thought. What you didn't do was think that we had the other exits covered and we could have just smoked it out. Or starved it out."

"It could dig new tunnels, Dean."

"Sam –" He stopped. Inevitable. All of it. "Promise me. Stick to the plan."

"You sound just like Dad." Sam actually grinned.

Yep. Someone was going to end up dead. Dean had not the slightest doubt.

"Promise me."

"I promise. I will stick to the plan," Sam said. _As long as I see fit_, Dean heard the unsaid. _Unless I come up with a better idea_. "What's the plan?"

x

x

x

…tbc…

x x x

a/n Apologies for a long wait for a short chapter. Real life showed up and gave me a swift kick in the ruptured appendix. Should have more and better sooner.


	5. Sign of the Gypsy Queen

For Once, Then, Something

**Summary:** Dean and Sam track a kidnapped girl to southern Arizona, to the winter home of a Romani family. There all seems quiet and ordinary, and the boys are welcomed into this secretive and clannish society. But someone doesn't want them there, and has the ability to strike back when they get too close. And there's an FBI agent after them. Of course.

**Timeline:** Second season AU, but only in the sense that John is alive, and whatever else happened in season two, didn't happen. 'Cause this is so unbelievably late.

_**Chapter 5: Sign of the Gypsy Queen**_

She probably thought this was funny. Last night Sam had agreed to the meeting without hesitation, just to get her out the room before Dean could do something … regrettable. The location was her choice, and he'd noted it down without thought, the remnants of his headache still occupying most of his brain.

Prison Hill. Leahy probably thought it was funny.

The Old West era prison that had once been here was now reduced to a tourist trap, charging entrance fees to people who liked to cringe in mock horror at the living conditions of people who couldn't get out. If there was picturesque in Yuma, it was here, a bluff overlooking the Colorado River, but to find it you had to block out the noise of the interstate roaring next door, and pretend the Colorado was a real river and not the dammed, drained and concrete-walled irrigation ditch it had been reduced to.

No doubt Agent bloody Leahy found that freaking hilarious, too.

She was waiting when he got there, sipping on a cup of coffee from a paper cup, leaning against the hood of her rented car. The prison was doing good business, winter being the busy season down here, but they were parked on the far edge of the lot where no one was going to interrupt them.

"You're looking better," she said, when he emerged from the car and stood opposite her, his arms crossed, leaned against the Impala.

"Can we just-" he stopped. Rudeness was not going to get him anywhere. He could smell the coffee in her hand. He'd slept late and managed to drag himself out of bed in time to meet her only because Dean had thrown the car keys at him with a laughing 'don't forget your date' dig.

He smiled tightly. "Can we just skip to the accusations and interrogation, please."

"Are we a little hung over this morning?"

_We?_ Maybe he should have let Dean hit her. Just the once. But he didn't dignify that with any other response. She held the paper cup to her lips, not drinking, just letting the aroma and steam soothe the dryness. "No accusations," she shrugged. "I'm just curious, honestly. I didn't expect to find you here. In Yuma."

_If she wasn't going to drink the damn thing…_ He should have stopped on the way here, grabbed some coffee for himself. Another couple of minutes wouldn't have made any difference. "What are you doing here then? Aren't you following us?" Plus, it might have improved his mood some.

_Why would I be following you?_ Her false, brittle smile taunted. _Is there any reason I should? _

"In fact I was following up on that – what do you call it – fetish? – bag your brother found." She pulled chin length black hair back behind one ear, stirred loose by the breeze."Or placed. It took a whole team of FBI ethnographers to tell me it was Romani in origin, and then the forensics people found the yucca pollen. So I go rushing off to scout out the area's Romanies… and here you are." All friendly. As though coincidences like that didn't make the neck hairs of any investigator peg like a wire brush. "What I want to know is how you got here before me. I flew." It was almost peevish.

Sam couldn't help the twisted grin. "Would you care if I told you we exceeded the speed limit in several states?"

"It's like you already knew what to look for."

That stung. It surprised him how much. Dean _had_ known what to look for. Not because he'd set up some elaborate con the way she expected but because this was their job, and they were good at it. They had a lifetime's experience at it. Sam's lifetime.

"We do this all the time," Sam admitted, aware of the fine line he was skirting. "We have… a specialized area of expertise, let's say." One that all the forensics teams and FBI ethnographers were not any better at than two unaccredited brothers. Not all expertise came with letters after your name.

"_Let's say_," she repeated, as if agreeing to a euphemism. She evaluated him evenly, and he couldn't quite place her expression. "What about your vision?"

He'd almost expected that question. But not the way she asked it, as if she was looking for an answer beyond just what she was asking. "The visions sometimes give me clues – some detail that we can use. Not so much in this case." It was tempting to go further, the way she looked at him with open curiosity rather than skepticism or derision, but instead he outlined how they had followed actual, if flimsy, evidence to bring them here. He also carefully explained that Zora herself was a dead end. In his opinion, which the FBI would no doubt distrust.

"Visions? As in plural?" Her head cocked and her eyebrow rose just slightly. "They look like they hurt."

Sam grimaced, looked away. The shiver down his spine was probably due to the early morning breeze, standing out here exposed on the hill top. With no coffee. Prickly pear and saguaro cactus were about the only things that grew here, and from the look of the specimens nearby, even they found it something of a struggle. The old prison made him uneasy, a place of suffering and death. Perhaps that was the intention, meeting here. Designed to unsettle him with the threat of the law if he was a fraud, and with the cold spirit of the place if he wasn't. Leahy wasn't here to learn about his visions, he reminded himself. Not an enemy, precisely, but still dangerous and it would be a mistake to trust her.

She sighed, subject dropped. The expression on her face was unreadable again when he turned back to look at her. "I don't, you know," she responded, grimacing around the last of her coffee, gone cold. She shook it out, and tossed the remains inside the passenger side of her car. "Discount you. I think I understand you better than you might think."

Don't bite, Sam. Don't let her hook you. "How so?"

"I know about family pressures. I looked you up, last night. And your family. You'd be surprised at the interesting picture you make."

"Really?" He was curious, admittedly, what his life looked like from the outside.

"We have this thing called family profiling. How the rules of society are sometimes subverted by the predominant family culture."

"I have no idea what that means."

Her expression doubted his ignorance. "It means that in some families the criminal culture is so ingrained that it becomes the norm. You see it in the mafia, for instance, in drug-addicted parenting, even in some sub-cultures like the Romani."

"Or the Winchesters."

"See, I knew you were the smart one." She flipped open a small notebook. "John Winchester, Marine Corps honorably discharged, last of Lawrence, Kansas, as of twenty-three years ago. No permanent residence since then. No visible source of income, no tax returns. Left Lawrence while still under investigation for the suspicious fire and consequent death of his wife, Mary Winchester."

Sam went still. He'd known this was coming too. This was why they stayed out of the reach of the cops and especially the FBI all these years. Even so, it felt like he couldn't breathe.

"Dean Winchester, suspected in the assault of two women and violent death of one person in St. Louis, Missouri. He was supposedly killed there, by some unidentified hero. Yet here he is. Also no permanent residence, no visible source of income and no tax returns. No verifiable social security number, for that matter."

"Unidentified hero?" His voice rose over this unlikely description.

"One of the victims, Rebecca Warren, maintains that she has no memory of the incident, due to her trauma." Agent Leahy's eyes stabbed him. "She was a friend of yours, I understand. A classmate from Stanford."

"If you have an actual question in there, I think I missed it."

"You were visiting her at the time."

"Yes, I was."

"With Dean."

Sam didn't answer that one.

"Ms. Warren identified the dead man as Dean Winchester."

"Obviously she was mistaken."

She leaned forward. "Isn't that interesting, though. You and your brother disappear right afterwards, not even sticking around long enough to clear up this little misunderstanding of whether he's alive or dead." She paused, looking at Sam as if he was a particularly challenging abstract painting. "Doesn't he find it a bit inconvenient? Being dead and all?"

"Dean's a 'below the radar' kind of guy."

Leahy laughed freely. "No doubt. Who attacked your friend, Sam, and who is buried in St. Louis?"

It was like a stiletto, so sharp you didn't feel it until it was much too late. She watched him, as if waiting for blood to seep through.

Sam sighed and leaned back, re-crossed his legs, one in front of the other. "You probably won't believe me."

"Try me."

"It was Dean. My _cousin_ Dean."

"Your cousin." She clearly didn't believe him. "Your cousin, Dean Winchester."

"You mentioned family profiling… does that include families that don't talk to each other for decades? My dad… he … well, I never really got the whole story. Either he was kicked out or walked away on his own, but by the time Dean – my brother – was born, Dad hadn't spoken to his family for almost ten years. My uncle – my dad's brother – named his son Dean, too."

Leahy scratched at her temple as if this was just unlikely enough to be true. And even if it wasn't, it was entertaining. "A family name, no doubt." Sam just raised an eyebrow in confirmation. "And the family resemblance?"

"Uncanny." He kept the grin off his face, but he couldn't quite control it in his voice.

"Two Dean Winchesters. The mind boggles."

"You have no idea."

"And how did you all end up in St. Louis?"

"My cousin was obviously a psychopath. Unfortunately we didn't know that when we decided to have our screwed up little 'family reunion'. We went to St. Louis to meet him, not Rebecca, dropped in on her while we were there. After that…" he shrugged. "Things sorta went south."

"Who shot your cousin?"

"I'm gonna have to take the fifth on that, Agent Leahy. Sorry."

She scowled. "It's easy enough to check."

"You're welcome to try."

"While you and your brother do another disappearing act, I suppose."

"If you have the evidence, arrest us." A calculated risk. They both knew that figuring out the Winchester family tree, disproving his claim of a near-identical cousin would take a lot longer than the forty-eight hours she could hold them without charge. It would probably take quite a bit less to gather evidence of credit card fraud, but maybe the blatant but shiny lie would distract her from the more prosaic truth.

Besides, she still wanted something from him. The missing girl, and a potential career coup.

She smiled tightly. "I'm trying to tell you that I think I understand where you're coming from. This was your family. They were your whole world. No one could blame you for that."

"Now you're just trying to flatter me." Sam fiddled with a button on his coat. Anything but look at her. The temptation to deny, to explain, to justify, was like the aching buildup to a thunderstorm. She wouldn't understand. She thought they were criminals. And yet, she wasn't actually wrong about what she said. Just about what it meant.

"Then you ran away, got into Stanford." She didn't need to look at her notebook for this part. Instead she kept her gaze on him. "Scholarship. Congratulations, by the way. Four years with an unblemished record. An academic star. Friends and teachers with nothing but good things to say about you. And then, days after your brother shows up in your life again, your girlfriend dies in another mysterious fire."

"How dare you," Sam hissed, standing erect. "Dean had nothing to do with that."

"Maybe, maybe not."

"I was there!"

"Then your friend Zack's girlfriend is killed, Zack's sister Rebecca assaulted –"

"That –" She raised an eyebrow at his hesitation. Sam forced his anger down. "That wasn't my brother." Once he got started there would be no stopping. He could see the glitter of triumph in her eyes. She was goading him for a reaction.

She was right about one thing. He was not normal. He had stood on the edge of normal for four years, looking in, never quite convincing himself or anyone else that he belonged. But he wasn't, never could be. If his family was his subculture, if that was where he belonged, then so be it. If that was where he fit, then so be it. He was a Winchester. All or nothing.

"I wanted to show you this," she said, holding out a thin file folder.

He hesitated before taking it, although he could guess what was in it. He was right. Michael Grant, six years old, a typical school portrait of a big head, crooked teeth in a shy grin, dark eyes focused on the photographer and not on the camera. Not someone Sam recognized, either from the camp or from his own search. Kati Cavanaugh, maybe all of four years old. Missing for four years.

Four years.

There were five or six more photos in the file, a short profile after each, ones he recognized from his own search. He'd have to check but there could easily be one or two on his list that Agent Leahy had missed. Which made – eight kids. Nine, including Kayla Andersen.

Sam handed the file back to her. "What connects them? Why these kids?" he asked her, something that had been nagging at him.

She took the file, staring at him. _You knew about this already_. Well, he had. She knew something was up as well, if she'd put this profile together. "Targets of opportunity. Wrong place wrong time."

Again, that invitation in her voice. _Tell me, show me. Let me in._ Sam wondered distantly if they taught that as an interrogation technique in FBI school. _Let's work together,_ a temptation worse than money or drugs. He shook his head, contradicting. "Somebody went to a great deal of trouble for these kids. For Kayla for sure."

"I only put this together yesterday. The FBI has – we never had any inkling of a serial kidnapper. You –" Leahy took a deep breath, swallowing her outrage, the thought that the Winchester brothers could do so easily what the FBI fumbled. "I don't know what you're doing as part of this, Sam. I really don't. But this is huge. This is a career making, or career busting case. When this breaks – we're talking about national news, for weeks."

Sam shrugged deeper into his coat. You wouldn't think Arizona would be so cold.

"There are going to be investigations into the investigations, Sam. Tell me what you know, get out now while you still can. I'll do what I can to protect you–"

"I'll make you a deal," he said, cutting her off.

"Astonish me," she huffed, annoyed that he would interrupt her right in the middle of her big pitch.

"We'll find the girl for you. You take all the credit. You forget about everything you ever learned about my father and my brother."

The invitation was gone, her eyes flinty. Narrowed enough to bring out the lines at the corners. _Disappointed?_ _Angry. _She confused him. _Why was she angry with him now?_

"All of them, alive."

"I don't know if they're all still alive or not." He held up a hand to forestall her outburst. "If they are, we'll get them out."

He watched as she looked off into some middle distance, calculating something he couldn't see. Making a deal with the devil, so to speak, if she actually believed that he was a criminal. A kidnapper, or worse. It made his mouth twitch, almost a grin, thinking he'd never been on this side of such a deal.

"What?" she demanded, seeing his look.

He shook his head. "Nothing. Doesn't matter."

"If I find any indication, any _breath_ that you or your brother had something to do with her disappearance…"

Sam shook his head wearily. "We didn't. You won't."

"Done, then." She actually held out her hand for him to shake.

He ignored the gesture. They were not friends. They were never going to be friends. All or nothing.

Her hand dropped. He didn't look at her expression. "Sam," she called, when he had already stood and shook himself out a little, turned towards the car.

He turned back.

"Just… be careful. As you say, someone has gone to a lot of trouble for these kids."

He nodded and got back in the car. He watched her as she drove away first. There was no point regretting the encounter. There hadn't been any hope from the beginning that he could persuade an FBI agent to believe him, to believe the things he and Dean knew. To trust that they were good people, trying to help. So to be disappointed in something that could never have happened in the first place was ridiculous, surely.

x x x

**Dean found** himself outside of Zora's _ofisa_ without really intending it. Sam had the car, and hadn't called yet with the results of his meeting with the FBI woman. With the Romani camp itself out of bounds for the moment, their avenues of investigation were rather limited. Whatever had happened to Sam last night, whatever had _attacked_ him, Dean had no intention of letting it happen again. The visions were bad enough. To go through that kind of mental and physical torture for no visible gain – he wished to god for something to eviscerate.

He didn't know what would happen if he went in by himself – likely nothing much, going by their first attempt. More good food and good – make that vile – drink. Good company. And he'd completely forget what he was supposed to be doing. Rip Van Winkle without the benefit of catching up on his sleep. But after lecturing his brother last night about sticking to the plan, he felt bound to abide by it himself. Not that they actually had a plan. Yet.

So a restless energy kept him walking, until he ended up here.

She appeared in the outer room when he called her name, smiled gently to see him. She waved him through the tent-like stage for the tourists into the back room, a bare loft style room, rough wood floors and grey fly-specked windows. There was table and counter, a single laundry-sized sink. Bare pipes, water, power, disused air ducts scrambled across the high ceiling and walls like a computer screensaver, evidence of a hundred years of use of this building, every occupant adding another layer of confusion. And dust.

"You're here alone?"

She cocked her head to show that she'd heard him, though she didn't turn around from filling a kettle.

"The old woman?" Dean prompted again. Zora set out two cups on the table without asking if he wanted anything. "What's her story, anyway?"

"Old Mother Elena?"

"Yeah."

"She has many stories."

Dean rubbed at one eye. That was typical Gypsy doubletalk. It meant that Zora wasn't ready to answer directly, not without knowing what he wanted.

"How is your brother this morning?"

"He's fine." Still breathing anyway.

She smiled at him, not the mysterious enigmatic 'I know things' expression of her profession, but a young girl's grin. A teenager again. "A bit too much of the _pé_?" At his confusion, she indicated drinking, thumb and little finger extended, as if pouring a tankard down her throat.

She poured the hot water over loose tea. Dean would have asked for coffee, but he didn't see any evidence that she had the makings. "He wasn't drunk. Someone attacked him."

"Someone hit him?" Outrage, surprise.

"Not… physically. In the head." He spread his fingers out, shrugging, his hands floating just above the table top and not even sure what that was supposed to signal or suggest. Yes, all right, fine. This shit freaked him out. "Magically." Psychically.

"No."

Dean put his hands back in his lap. Zora's denial was honest, as far as he could tell. More disbelief than outright denial. There were few options here. He had nothing to defend himself with, or Sam, if she was truly the one behind the attack. "Who could do that?" he asked her. "Who has that kind of power?"

"Not me."

"Who else?" He didn't bother to debate her denial. She was either lying or telling the truth. If she was lying, there was no way for him to catch her at it right now. If she was telling the truth, accusations would only offend her, and right now he needed her help.

"You think Elena?"

"I'm asking what you think." She didn't deny it. The expression on her face clouded, thinking about it. "So you think she could. Attack someone with power."

"But why? Why would she do that?"

"She said that Sam was touched." The thought made Dean grind his teeth, an automatic denial. The first time Elena and Sam had met, Elena had spotted something 'unclean' on him in a matter of seconds. Zora looked away from Dean. "What does that mean? Zora, tell me."

She took a deep breath. "I don't know so much." She chewed on her answer, not finding any words that fit. She stood again, walking a few steps away.

"Zora!" he demanded, and she turned back to him.

"It's complicated!"

"Tell me."

"Dean, to really understand you have to understand the Romani. All of it, all that we are."

"What part don't I understand, Zora? The magic, the spirits? The way the outside world has one set of rules but the family has a whole different set? The taking what you need even if it breaks the law of the outside world? You think I don't get that _every day_?"

"The running away part," she inserted when he stopped, his voice running down like pressure from a burst tire. "You don't understand the running away part."

Dean closed his eyes. Because he did. He was beginning to. Sam's voice in his ear, soft and demanding, _the Dean Winchester I know_…. Last night, Dean had tried running. The instinct to run was in him. To fight another day. Self preservation. Survival. It was Sam who set his mulish feet against any backing down. And it was Sam who would fling himself into a fire without any hope of coming out of it.

"That's what they say about the _Gadze Rom_, John Winchester. The one who fought back. He never ran away. You are his son." She traced ephemeral patterns on the table top with one fingertip, dragging a drop of tea into sigils and swirls. "Some _gadze_ – outsiders who _study_ us – they say we came from warriors. That we were an army, captured in India and sent abroad as prisoners. I don't know." She shook her head. Not denial, more not understanding. The _gadze_ were strange. "We teach the children, yes, but we don't have schools, or universities. There are stories everyone knows, father to son, mother to daughter. That is who we are, how we are." She paused, thinking her own thoughts. "We Rom have no stories of this time. And if we have no stories, we have no history. If we were warriors, once… we aren't now."

No stories, no history. Dean drank this in with his tea.

"None from that time. But we do have other stories –" and she hesitated. "I shouldn't be telling you this. It belongs to the Rom."

"Zora –" His heart thumped in his chest like before his father had dropped the key of the Impala into his open palm. Like any wrong movement would send what he wanted so desperately flying away, never to be captured again. "The _Rom baro_, last night, he said something about the Black Dog. Not really a _black dog_, but something that stalks the Romani-"

She made a hissing sound and slashed at the air in what he assumed was a protective sign.

"Zora, please."

She sipped at her tea. "We - we are not warriors," she repeated, emphatically. "When the Black Dog comes for us, we run. We hide, and we do our little magics to protect ourselves. We mourn our losses, and move on."

"What did Elena mean by how Sam was 'touched'?" _Blood without soul._

"We have a story," she began, slowly. "_Swatura_, you understand. One of the real stories. The Black Dog will designate a sacrifice, a special child, to be given to him on the day he turns a man. He marks this child as an infant, but lets him grow to the delight of his parents. A beautiful child, wise and loving. So when the Black Dog comes for him all will feel his loss the more. We Romani hide our children until they are too old to be marked by the Black Dog. We tie them with charms and protection, and do not name a permanent name until then."

"Marked how?"

"The blood. From mother to child, but it is – changed. Not her blood, but his. It stains him, stains his soul."

"No."

She flinched from Dean's denial. His refusal. "This is the story, Dean."

And to the Romani, stories equaled history. "Why? What does it want with the Romani?"

Zora only shrugged, like the question had never occurred to her. The motivations of folk tales were often unfathomable, obscured by time and context and retelling.

"What happens if the child isn't turned over to him? Once he's an adult?"

Zora shook her head. "I don't know this story." Like no one had ever tried. _We run, we hide._

Dean looked at her, troubled. He didn't understand the running away part, after all.

Her eyes dropped, and she reached for his tea, now empty. Her hand trembled just a little before she took the cup, but she didn't look in it right away. His eyes widened as he realized what she was about to do. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what she would see there.

"The story of the _Gadze Rom_ has spread on wings, Dean," she whispered, not looking at him. "After a thousand years, someone who fights back."

"We're not fighting your battles for you, Zora. I don't even know if the thing –" Again the hiss and the slashed gesture, "If we're after the same thing. And it still doesn't explain what happened to Sam last night."

Zora glanced up at him, and removed her hand from on top of his tea. He couldn't read her expression, the way she was looking down, but she drew in a huffed breath, as if at pain, expected but still stinging and sharp.

"What?"

Her eyes glittered. "You will live a long and healthy life."

Bullshit. More Gypsy doubletalk. "Zora," his voice warned.

"Elena knows more than me," she said instead, and he wondered if she was changing the subject or not. "I'm…" and she shrugged. "I'm just learning, still."

And why would the old woman want to attack the Winchesters if they were the great hope against the enemy of the Romani – but she hadn't attacked the Winchesters, had she? She had attacked Sam, power against power. According to Romani tradition, Sam carried the mark of the ancient enemy on his soul.

_I have plans for you, Sammy, and all the children like you._

_Oh, Jesus_. It might have been an honest prayer. They were the same. The Winchesters called it the Demon, the yellow-eyed son of a bitch, and his mouth quirked at the unexpected coincidence of language. He somehow doubted this Dog had ever been whelped though, it must have been created out of the depths of hell itself. What was a thousand years to such a creature? A lazy afternoon in the sun.

And where did John Winchester and his sons stand in its being? Why did they rate its special attention?

Was it the demon's doing, kidnapping a little girl? Why? And the elaborate hex, why would it need that? It didn't make sense. No, this was a distraction. The girl and the Romani connection to the demon were coincidental. The girl was Romani. There were a string of other missing kids that could be connected the same way. To Zora, and thereby to Zora's _familia._ Dean had no doubt that Zora could lay down a pretty good hex herself, but to make things disappear? To remove someone from memory?

Power like that – and he was back to the goddamn demon. Or _a_ demon. A summoning. Oh _shit_. Tying a demon down and using, compelling, its power for your own purposes. 99 of the time immediately followed by said summoner regretting he'd ever been born.

Which meant what? To summon a demon was not actually that difficult, didn't require any special skills or _abilities_ on the part of the summoner. Teenage idiots found the workings on the internet with depressing regularity. Indeed, anyone with any sort of training or experience usually knew better than to even try.

Motive. What need did these children fulfill?

They had to search the camp. There was no avoiding it.

They _couldn't_ search the camp, because some fucking spell made them forget everything anytime they went near it. And – probably – put the whammy on Sam when he – what? – fought back against the spell? Used his own scary brain mojo against it?

Fuck that.

Dean was freaked by Sam's visions, wigged out by the whole notion of human powers, but he knew better than to ignore what was staring him in the face. Sam figured Kayla at least was still alive. And if there was some power protecting the camp, the same power that took her, made her parents forget, maybe – it was the perfect hiding place.

"Do you know why we're here, Zora?"

She didn't look up. "Your brother said he was looking for someone. Asked if he would find her." Her eyes were shiny when she did look up. "I said he would."

"You said he would, or you _saw_ he would?"

Zora stood abruptly, pushing herself away from the table. Dean noted that she kept his used teacup clutched close to her. "What did you see there?" He followed her.

She held out a hand, for payment, when she saw he wasn't going to drop it or let her go.

Dean sighed. He had a few dollars in his wallet, but no real silver. Payment with money only got the _gadze_ what they wanted to hear out of the Romani. Real silver and the inscribed sigil, while not magically powerful, was still a signal that the person was not a mere mark to be easily duped. Made it more of a trade between equals. It did not compel the truth from the Gypsy woman, but one's reputation and prestige could rest on such readings.

"We're looking for a girl. A Romani girl, adopted by a white family and then kidnapped." Dean didn't touch her, or threaten really, but he stood close enough that he knew he was invading her personal space. It was a big wide room and he all but pinned her against wall, right between the sink and the countertop.

Zora looked from side to side as he crowded her, looking for escape. She would have to touch him, physically push him back to get away.

"Her parents want her back."

Zora shook her head, whispered, "She is dead to us. You should not look here."

This close Dean could see the flush creeping up her neck, even under her caramel coloring. No Rom would stand so close. The merest brush of her skirts against him was _marime,_ contamination. But Dean wasn't Rom. "Sam says she's here." Not precisely true, but close enough. "You just said he would find her."

"Not here." The words came out firm. She looked him full in the face for the first time, as if finding the power to do so finally. She was _Phuri dai_ of the Cooper _familia, _Old Mother Elena's apprentice. Even at sixteen she held the _familia's_ future, the knowledge of things, in her hands. "You should leave here. You and your brother. I'm telling you."

He let her go, stood back a bit, satisfied. It didn't prove anything, but under intimidation Zora only responded with strength, not a need to strike out or defend herself.

_Telling him what_? Threatening him? No, it didn't sound like a threat. He described the hex he'd found under Kayla's bed to her, the dead animal in the center. Her eyes widened, but she shook her head. She was just the apprentice. The old woman…

"You said Stefan was her grandson." Dean tried a different tack. _Let's work together._

"He is."

"The _Rom baro_ said she had no one. She would leave no one when she died." The Romani equivalent having never been born. Family was the only thing. "Which is it?"

"I don't – He wouldn't say that. I don't understand you."

He said it slowly, because it was only now starting to make some kind of horrible sense in his brain. "Where did Stefan come from?" Her mouth opened as she reached for the automatic explanation, that Stefan was part of the _familia_, she'd known him forever, she'd grown up with him. "Who were his parents?"

Only the usual reasons weren't there.

"Tell me what you saw in the tea leaves." Gently. Inevitably. Irresistibly.

"Death," she said, her eyes closed. "In three."

x x x

"**Did you** hear me?"

"I heard you, Dean," Sam responded. "I just don't see that it makes any difference."

"She's saying that three people will die."

"And I'm telling you that we have an FBI agent on our case. She's after the girl, but failing that she's more than willing to mount our heads over her desk." He looked up from the laptop. "It's weird, though."

Dean shrugged his coat around his shoulders. Normally not a problem, but right now he had a pin hole camera fitted through one of the button holes, and a wire running underneath the coat, over his shoulder and down to a battery and transmitter at the small of his back. "What's weird?" he asked, when Sam didn't go on.

"Stop moving so much. You're fucking up the transmission."

"If it doesn't work when I'm moving–"

"Hold still." Sam got up and did something with the box attached to his back, something Dean couldn't see despite trying to turn himself in half.

"What's weird?" Dean prompted again, giving up trying to see. The battery was a thin pack strapped around his waist, under his clothes, good for six hours of continuous transmission of high quality digital video. He tried not to think about the small box transmitter though, EM radiation and its proximity to his vital organs.

He tried to see if the box poked out enough to be visible, standing, or … squatting as if he was sitting.

"Just don't lean forward," Sam advised, grinning at the poses Dean was making in the mirror. "It's this or you have to start carrying a purse."

"Fuck you. We should have gone for the body suit version –"

"The body suit version that your buddy Dave said was still experimental."

"Dad's buddy Dave. Hello, Yuma Marine Corps Air Station ten miles up the road. Of course he said it was experimental. Doesn't mean it doesn't work."

Sam made a face. "This," This being a remote surveillance and communication kit fitted out from the local Circuit City, camera, recorder, EMF detector. "Will work fine."

He then held out a tiny earpiece microphone and speaker in his palm. "This, on the other hand, I have no idea about." It was the one piece of equipment they'd needed Dad's buddy Dave for. Small enough to fit completely inside the ear canal, it was undetectable unless you were looking straight in someone's ear. And even then you could pretend it was just a hearing aid. But this fancy and expensive gizmo actually piggybacked on the video signal and it could produce sound as well as transmit. Sam could remotely direct Dean without anyone knowing.

Dean grimaced, feeling the earpiece mold itself inside his ear canal as he slid it in. "I feel violated."

"Oh, grow up," Sam said.

"You wanna see how it feels?"

Sam turned away. They both knew there was no choice in who would go in, and who would stay behind. Within range of whatever was protecting the camp, just thinking about Stefan had nearly put Sam out cold. "You just can't stand the idea of me telling you what to do."

"Yeah, that's it."

They tested it with Dean driving around. Sam sat at the video display in the motel room, pulling a headset microphone on and watching the bouncy picture as Dean walked out to the car, got in, turned the key. He had to turn down the bass tones, but the transmission came through loud and clear. The wonders of modern technology.

"If you start saying 'Can you hear me now' I'm going to have to kick your ass when I get back there," Dean warned from inside the Impala.

"Actually I was going to make you say it," Sam grinned.

Silence from Dean. He didn't find that funny. At all. As it was this setup was likely pushing all sorts of buttons in him, Sam knew. Control, loyalty, responsibility. But they were supposed to keep talking, testing the equipment. "What was weird?" Dean asked, just as Sam was about to relent and ask about Zora's tea leaves.

The way that Dean was sitting, Sam's video view consisted mostly of the dashboard and front hood of the Impala. There was no way for him to see Dean's face. Trust Dean not to let something completely irrelevant just drop.

"Sam! You said something was odd, about the FBI woman."

"Agent Leahy, Dean. Not 'the FBI woman'. It's probably an Irish name… It just makes me wonder. She kept wanting to talk about my visions."

"She doesn't believe in your visions."

"So she said."

"She thinks you're a fraud."

"She as much as said that too."

"You think she sees _the little people_?" Dean asked scathingly.

"I don't know, Dean. I just wonder how much she was trying to convince herself, and not me. I think she wanted to believe me."

"Huh. That's the worst kind then. Like a reformed smoker or something."

The signal faded out after half a mile. That was pretty impressive, and more than good enough for their needs. Fortunately, the microphone lasted a bit longer than the video signal, so that Sam could call him back when he was getting out too far.

x x x

"**Dean, what** do you see?"

_Oh hell._ Dean shook his head. His brother's voice was right there. Inside his head. The fuck. _That_ wasn't a good sign.

What did he see? He saw fuck all. Literally, fuck all. The worst fog he'd ever imagined, except that it wasn't cold, or damp, but it made his head swirl until he couldn't tell whether he was moving or the fog was.

"Dean." Sam's voice again, strained patience, like his voice was tied up and couldn't move. "Dean, look at your hand."

Without really meaning to, Dean looked at his left palm. 'Do what Sam says' in black felt. He recognized his own messy handwriting even in that medium.

"Dean, I don't have time to explain it to you. Just trust me. You have to do exactly as I tell you."

Rebellion rose in him, jerked his head sideways as if his head wanted to get away all on its own from the rest of his body. Which stood still, feet glued in place. Follow orders. Trust Sam.

"Keep walking."

Sam's voice was threaded with tension, humming like high tension electricity. _Keep calm, keep calm,_ Dean heard, as if Sam had said it aloud, though he wasn't sure who it was supposed to reassure, himself or Dean.

"Keep walking, Dean. Don't stop. I can't come get you if you – Dean, say something!"

His mind was screaming _runrunrunrun_ at him from some other level entirely.

Dean closed his eyes, opened them again when it didn't help with the swirling motion. He had no memory of how he came here. White upon white. Where here was. He could see his feet, his dusty boots, but nothing beyond them. Not like he stood on air, but – he was falling, dizzying, endless. He clenched his eyes shut again. Only Sam's voice in his ear – and he recognized it now as in his ear and not directly into his brain, thank christ – kept him connected from one second to the next, as if memory itself was set free and floated downstream, unconnected to anything solid. Sam's voice was a line that unspooled behind him, not holding him back so much as leaving a reminder, a trail of breadcrumbs, leading him back.

_Can you hear me now?_

"A door. I see a door." He had seen it, before, he remembered. The door resolved itself inside his mind, image and word coming together after getting lost in the fog.

He heard Sam's gulped breath, worry transmitted more quickly with the sudden stop in the flow of words. "Jesus, Dean. Don't scare me like that."

"Sam. Door?" _Do what Sam says_. Sam better fucking say something pretty goddamn fast. 'Cause standing with his metaphorical dick waving in the breeze – no memory why he was here, no notion of what to do next – was going to stop being fun in a fucking hurry.

"Um, okay, I see it too. Knock on the door." Sam said. "Politely."

Dean reached out with his fingers, not trusting his eyes. Metal. He felt the metal under his hands, but when he tried opening his eyes it all seemed to flow away from him like a mirage. He knocked, couldn't tell if it was politely or not by anyone else's standards but he managed not to put all his frustration behind it. Not his fault that the door was small, and thin. And rattled a bit dangerously.

"Step back. The door opens outward."

Dean took a step back, but then stumbled a bit to find nothing behind for his foot, until it hit the step below. He was standing on stairs. Steps. Something.

Not a car door. A trailer. A vacation thing – like –

_Oh, shit_. He was in middle of some fucking spell, wasn't he?

This realization lanced through his head like he'd been cleaved open. Profanity spilled from him as he crumpled like a rejected love letter off the steps.

Sam's voice in his head, rising in tone and hysteria. A river of noise that just wouldn't let him let go. Jesus, Sam, just let me sleep. I promise to never ever drink –

Not drunk. Not hung over and the pain was fading even as Sam's voice continued in his head 'DeanyoufuckerItoldyou to do what I said. Can't you do what I say for once? Is it so fucking hard –" Dean moaned, all he could manage out of 'shutTHEFUCKup', but it caught Sam, made him at least take a breath. "Dean. Dean? Dean, please –"

"Yeah. What." He spat out dirt, resisting the urge to curl up with his arms around his head only because that meant moving. If this was what one of Sam's headaches felt like, Dean was surprised his brother had never asked him to beat him unconscious with a hammer. 'Cause that would have been a big improvement over this.

More swearing in his ear, this time in relief, which didn't really help either.

"Sam –" he whispered to his brother. No talk now. _Please._

"Look at the door. Just – look up, turn your – so I can see – yeah, like that."

Dean couldn't see any door, couldn't see much of anything, but as he rolled over, shifted a stone from under his hip, got what he really hoped wasn't prickly pear in the small of his back for his trouble, a face sort of… materialized… in front of him. A little girl's face, dark eyes, long dark hair. Pixie, Dean thought, for no reason he could later recall. Fae, definitely, though that maybe came from the clouding mist that surrounded her.

"You all right, mister?" the pixie asked, looking down at him.

"Kayla," Sam breathed in his ear.

x

x

x

tbc…

a/n. OMG. Yes, late. But better than never? No excuses. I apologize.  
As always, BigPink is my beta and my inspiration. I couldn't sell my soul for better in either category.  
To those who wrote urging me to keep going, thank you. Both of you. Without you I could have moved on with my life. Just kidding. Truly, without you this wouldn't have happened.


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